Rufus Wainwright: Rufus loves you

On his new album, Rufus Wainwright calls for a gay Second Coming. But his homosexuality has caused friction with his famous father, Loudon Wainwright III, he tells James McNair

In 1974, the country singer Loudon Wainwright III watched his folk singer wife Kate McGarrigle suckling their infant son. In a spirit of "celebration and envy", he sat down and wrote a song for the little boy: "Rufus Is a Tit Man". Twenty-nine years later, the song would hold a flat comic irony for Rufus. It does, however, serve as a conduit to a brief chat about gay sons and their straight fathers.

"When I was growing up and my dad began to sense that I was homosexual," says Rufus, "it freaked him out. And then we had that weird separation thing that often happens. You fall in love with your dad, then you both back off, and you're always trying to regain some kind of relationship. I think we're getting closer again now, though."

Wainwright is talking at a recording studio near Old Street in East London. He's here to finish his forthcoming third album, Want, a record which got under way at Bearsville studios in Woodstock, New York earlier this year. Sometime Massive Attack and Madonna collaborator Marius De Vries is producing, and guest musicians include The Band's legendary drummer, Levon Helm. Rufus is on keyboards, acoustic guitar and stacked, near-operatic, Queen II-style vocals. "Yeah, it's strings and virtual tap-dancers", he smiles. "But there's also me solo at the piano, and the Bearsville stuff is pretty raw."

This is Wainwright's first interview in months and he seems a tad nervous. His laugh is a bizarre staccato noise that sounds like it's been stolen from a Hanna-Barbera cartoon. He jokingly describes Want as his answer to War and Peace, and says its 29 songs will be released in two separate volumes. Which events in his life impacted on the writing of the record? "I think I'm going through my Saturn Return. I'm not particularly into astrology, but I do believe in that specific event; the idea that around 28 or 29 you have the choice to either continue in a certain way, perhaps stunting yourself and making your life intolerable, or to make a radical change for the better. My last album, Poses, was very voyeuristic and largely concerned with the ephemeral, but this one is more concerned with good, evil, love and death.

He continues: "They're burning records in the US just now, and accusing you of not being patriotic if you speak your mind, which is bullshit. The country has been hijacked by neoconservatism and fundamentalist Christianity, and there seems to be a fairly blatant bid for world domination going on. I want to be part of the artistic movement that's currently trying to wake America up; to write something that has a bit of cultural weight, I suppose. It's important to me, because I still think America is a great place."

Wainwright's mother Kate is one half of celebrated Canadian folk duo, The McGarrigle Sisters. When she and Loudon Wainwright divorced in 1977, Kate brought Rufus and his sister Martha up in Westmont, Montreal. Rufus took piano lessons from the age of six, was touring with The McGarrigle Sisters and Family at 13, and went on to study at two Montreal universities. He read music at McGill and art at Concordia, but completed neither course.

He says that John Lennon's son, Sean, played an important part in his early solo success. After hearing 1998's Rufus Wainwright, Lennon invited the singer to tour with him, and was magnanimous enough to let Rufus headline on occasion. The pair would later record a cover version of the Beatles' "Across The Universe". "He lives in another world, so I don't get to see him much," says Wainwright of John and Yoko's son. "I think he's very underrated, though, and he certainly has a lot to contend with."

At the time of 2000's Poses, meanwhile, Rufus was socialising with Leonard Cohen's daughter, Lorca. They often hung out at New York's Chelsea Hotel, a place immortalised in a titular song by her father. Wainwright lived at the hotel for six months and wrote much of Poses there. Its majestic, piano-led title track is about "the snakes and ladders game of fame, wealth and beautiful boyfriends". Parts of Poses were influenced by opera, and Wainwright has often talked about his love of Verdi and Puccini. He says that he's already seen Strauss's Electra three times this year – "twice straight and once while I was on ecstasy" – and confides that when he's done with Want, he may write an opera of his own. Asked to 'sell' opera to a non-believer like myself, he makes a pretty good case. "When the story, the orchestra, the power of the voice and the set design come together," he says, "it's like a laser beam of Western culture."

One of the perks of Wainwright being signed to Dreamworks is that the company employs musicians signed to its record label on its film soundtracks. Thus, in 2001, Rufus recorded Jean Renoir's "La Complainte de la Butte" for Moulin Rouge, and a take on Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" for the soundtrack of Shrek. These ventures were useful profile-raisers as well as earners. And now that Wainwright's affairs are being handled by Moby's number-crunching manager, Barry Taylor, all augurs well for the success of Want.

Wainwright has never been coy about his sexual preferences. "In terms of sales and the way this business works," he says, "I think I've reached some kind of glass ceiling as a result of that." As a straight man smitten with Wainwright's musicality, I'm not fully convinced by that argument: Freddy Mercury's overt camp never did Queen's record sales any harm and when Frankie went to Hollywood in the early Eighties, millions of straights hitched a ride. But if there are swathes of homophobes up in arms about Wainwright's records, it would be fun to force-feed them one of Want's key tracks, entitled "Gay Messiah".

"Religion is a critical issue for me", says Wainwright. "I love the Bible. I'm greatly intrigued by it. But of course I can't be part of it because homosexuality has no place on the agenda. It's ignored by all the other major religions, too, and that a real bugbear. In the light of all that, I figure that what we need right now is a gay messiah. Don't worry, though, it isn't me," he adds pre-empting any accusations of a messianic complex. "I'm Rufus the Baptist."

The closing track on Want takes us back to Rufus's relationship with his father. "Dinner At Eight", he says, was written after a "huge falling out" they had. "When my solo career first started," he explains, "I didn't know how to handle the press, and I could be flippant and dismissive. Let's just say that I said something that one should never say about one's father, and I had to learn some hard lessons about respecting people's feelings.

"When I first wrote "Dinner at Eight", it seemed really vengeful. I thought that it was too mean to record. But it stuck in my head and as time went on, I began to realise that it was actually a love song. Dad hasn't heard it yet, and I suppose I'm a bit nervous about that. It's intense and brutal. But is a love song."

'Want' is out on Dreamworks later this year. Rufus Wainwright plays The Lyric, Hammersmith, London W6 (020-8741 0824) on 13 May, as part of the 'Lyric Nights' season