Rufus Wainwright wrestles demons of middle age

He is unfollowing the rules

Rufus Wainwright was three years old, playing in the shallow end of a pool at the Chateau Marmont. The famous West Hollywood hotel was “kind of a dump” in those days, and a quasi-home to troubadours like Leonard Cohen and Wainwright’s parents, Loudon Wainwright III and Kate McGarrigle. Wainwright’s Irish nanny wasn’t paying attention when he suddenly went underwater — “and was presumably saved by Betty Buckley,” he said, laughing.

“Which is the story I stick by. It’s amazing how certain childhood traumas really inflict themselves indelibly on your memory.”

He told that story over lunch, pre-pandemic, in the same courtyard of the same hotel. A few days later, I got an email back from Buckley. “Yes, I saved Rufus from drowning when he was a little kid,” the Tony-winning “Cats” singer wrote. She didn’t know who he or his parents were at the time, and only recently heard about him telling this story onstage. “I was beyond thrilled to learn that I had actually saved Rufus Wainwright!” she wrote. “I’m a huge fan.”

This is Wainwright in a bottle: dramatic, humorous and in proximity to musical legends. The singer-songwriter, who is just about to turn 47, is using his creeping middle age to reckon with his past and future on a new album, “Unfollow the Rules.”

The title, also the name of a torch ballad on the record, was conceived by his young daughter, Viva — the granddaughter of Leonard Cohen by way of the late poet’s daughter and Wainwright’s childhood friend, Lorca Cohen. The song “perfectly illustrates the philosophy of this record, which is, ‘Don’t give me what I want, just give me what I’m needing,’” he said, quoting the lyrics.

“You’re never going to get the answer to the questions. And these kind of magical dreams that you have are great and wonderful, but that’s not really what’s going to sustain you as a human. And I don’t know how you’re going to get to the next step, but you just have to get there.”

This Rufus Wainwright is sober and battle-hardened after getting roughed up by the classical community for daring to compose two fullscale operas. Now, he’s singing about the marathon of marriage (to husband Jörn Weisbrodt), being the father of a 9-year-old and the fraught relationship with his own father. “When I look at my situation of bringing up a kid on my own, it just all becomes very heightened, and a little bit dangerous,” he said, “just in terms of depression and stuff.”

His parents divorced the same year of that near-drowning, and recently Rufus and Loudon have been working hard at reconciling after years of estrangement, both “aware of this necessity to be in each other’s lives in a profound way,” Rufus said.

“We aren’t close,” Loudon admitted in an email, “but we’re working on it. It’s not easy . ... I was an occasional father at best and there was also a great deal of acrimony between Kate and me. It lasted for decades. My father and I weren’t close either, but we wanted to be.”

“There’s a lot of information that I need from him,” Rufus said, “just about being this age, being in music, being a dad.”

It’s weird to hear this youthful gay icon — the Canadian American wunderkind who broke onto the scene in 1998 as the musical love child of Harry Nilsson and Franz Schubert, introducing an elegant style that a family friend dubbed “popera”; whose haunting cover of Cohen’s “Hallelujah” transcended its initial home on the “Shrek” soundtrack; who Elton John called “the best songwriter on the planet” — bemoaning his old age.

But Wainwright has lived a lot of life in those 47 years: surviving a rape at 14, drug addiction in the early years of his success, losing his mother to cancer in 2010. He wrestled with those demons on past albums, but somehow, he said, the regular midlife demons are more formidable.

“Pretty much all the emotions that I refer to — hatred, early morning madness, alone time, trouble in paradise,” he said, referencing song titles on the new album, “those are all things that I’m going through in my life. Having these very evident adversaries — drugs and death — made it more of a simple kind of situation, where you have to survive, and you have to mourn, all this stuff.

“Things like marriage, fatherhood, aging, yourself — those are far more daunting figures that really kind of rock your world a lot more, in a strange way. Because they aren’t as cut and dry.”

That said, “Unfollow the Rules,” out July 10, is not a sad album. Partly influenced by the 1960s Laurel Canyon scene — Wainwright lives right down the road, and often hangs out with friends in Mama Cass Elliot’s old house — it’s full of up-tempo singalongs, cheeky humour and even a pulsating electronica banger.

Martha Wainwright, who sings on the new album, said her brother “believes that he could be a pop star, and he believes that he should be in classical music . ... With that belief, though, comes disappointment sometimes, but it also propels him further, much further than he maybe even realizes . ... He’s made no artistic sacrifices, as far as I can tell.”

And Wainwright’s singing voice, according to many in his circle, is the best it’s ever been. After hearing him in January at an intimate concert at McCabe’s Guitar Shop in Santa Monica, Calif., Dale Franzen, the Tony-winning producer of “Hadestown,” told me: “There are singers you go to hear and you don’t care what they sing. I would go hear him sing anything.”

Rufus Wainwright