i have wings in the back of my mind (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} sunny_storm) wrote in ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif){kind=small} rufus_fans,@ 2006-05-24 08:09:00 |
|
if you want to read a paper...
fans of rufus,
many entires ago, i had asked the community if anyone had
known anything particular about rufus wainwright, being that i
was writing a paper on him. with your help & the help of passion,
my paper is complete & i figured i would post it here just incase
anyone had an interest in doing some "summer reading"
on our one man guy.
Rufus Wainwright has changed the shape, dynamic, style, structure, and texture of popular music. He has been said to be the best singer-songwriter of our time by his friend Elton John. Sting classified his music as “Sophisticated Pop”, others coining such terms as “Popera” and “Baroque Pop”. Songwriters of higher fame are fans of his music, his talent, and his ability to share with the world the secrets he keeps on the outer shell of his heart.
Rufus Wainwright was born on July 22, 1973 in Rhinebeck, New York to his folk singer parents Loudon Wainwright III and Kate McGarrigle who divorced a few short years after him and his sister, Martha, were born. He started playing the piano at the age of 6 and was inspired by musicals as a small child. At the age of thirteen, he performed his song, “I’m Running” in the movie Tommy Tricker and the Stamp Traveler, also playing a small role. His song earned him a nomination for the Genie Award for Best Original Song and earned him a nomination for the 1990 Juno Award for Most Promising Male Vocalist. It was only a year after that when Rufus came out as a homosexual. At the age of 14, Rufus went to many gay bars and has said of himself that he looked like a “young fourteen.” After picking up a man at a bar, Rufus was raped in London’s Hyde Park, which he only survived by pretending to be an epileptic going into a seizure. Of course, being that it was the 80’s, Rufus remained celibate for seven years afraid that he had gotten the AIDS virus.
When Rufus began performing, he tried to “make it” in New York. He went to Sine’s where Jeff Buckley was currently performing. After being rejected numerous amounts of time, he went back to Montreal, the city in which he was raised by his mother, and cut a series of demo tapes (On your CD, Track 1 is a recording of “Danny Boy” from the demo tape he sent to Sine’s). The demo tape that he sent out to Sine’s was the one that found its way into the hands of Lenny Waronker, the executive for DreamWorks, by the help of his father, Loudon. The label signed him and soon after released his first album, Rufus Wainwright, in the spring of 1998. The album was very successful in Canada and Rolling Stone magazine said for it to be one of the best albums of the year. During the recording of Poses, his second album, which was released in 2001, Rufus began using drugs heavily. His drug use never got in the way of his work. His mother said of his drug use that it was, “never to self destruct.” His album was, again, successful in Canada but not as much in the States. His first American exposure came when Rufus opened for Tori Amos in 2001 and 2002.
In between Poses and Want One, Rufus Wainwright called his friend, Elton John, for advice on his drug using after having a realization that he was losing his mind (he temporarily went blind). He quickly checked himself into rehab. Once Rufus became sober, he had found that he had written approximately thirty songs in his head during his drug abuse. The result has been two of his most successful albums, Want One and Want Two. Since the start of his career, Rufus has recorded on 48 albums and is only mildly successful in the United States.
The first song I’d like to talk about is from Want Two, his latest album. Rufus Wainwright is known musically for not writing a distinctive chorus in his songs. In “This Love Affair” (Track 2 on your CD), there are five versus with no chorus and no distinctive bridge. Each verse has differences, but it is clearly heard in the form of verse 1, verse 2, verse 3, verse 3’, and verse 2’.
I don’t know what I’m doing
I don’t know what I’m saying
I don’t know why I’m watching all these white
people dancing
I don’t know where I’m going
But I do know that I’m walking, where?
I don’t know, just away from this love affair
I can’t say that I’m cruisin’,
Not that I don’t like cruisin’,
Just that I’m bruisin’ from you
I can’t say that I’m waltzin’
Not that I don’t like waltzin’
Would rather be waltzin’ with you
So I guess that I’m going
I guess that I am walking. Where?
I don’t know, just away from this love affair
At the end of each phrase, there is a cadence of some kind, answering the questions that he asks in his lyrics. The lyrics represent confusion, but the music is entirely straightforward. All of his verses end in a retransition so that there is no feeling of a chorus or bridge to come.
“This Love Affair” was written in b flat minor. The form is simple in the sense that it begins with the tonic, moves slowly to the dominant, and falls right back to the tonic. The harmony reminds me of two sounds: the first being a chant and the second, a slow tango, per say. The B section, verses two and five, briefly give us the idea that we’re moving to D flat major, but are unable to resist the dominant in b minor. This same thing happens in the C section, versus three and four, but work in the opposite direction, working or pulling towards the key of the subdominant. Along with the harmony, the rhythm also has a sense of repetition, being that he uses this same rhythm in “Natasha” (Want One), “Cigarettes and Chocolate Milk” (Poses) and “As in Happy” (live performance) [Tracks 3, 4 and 5 on your CD]. It is known that his mother first used it in her song “Entre la Jeunesse et las Sagesse.” There is hardly any decoration in his accompaniment for it is a style of Rufus Wainwright’s to keep the piano simple vamp, for example, “Maker Makes” (Track6).
One of Rufus’ most expressive, yet still intricate songs is from Want Two entitled “The Art Teacher” (Track 7 on your CD). This was recorded live and the baritone solo was added afterwards, but Rufus Wainwright felt no need to “fancy” it up. The night before he began writing “The Art Teacher”, he and his producer went to a Philip Glass performance. His producer later said that he could see something turning in Rufus’ mind. The next day, he heard Rufus playing extremely similar repetitive rhythms on the piano, a style very much linked to and reflective of Philip Glass. The content of the song is written in the perspective of a small girl who has a crush on her art teacher. During a live concert at the Beacon Theater, Rufus prefaced this song by saying, “...hopefully by the end of the song, you’ll realize that the little girl is me.” He had met an art teacher at the gym and it was very common for Rufus to fall in love with straight men and write about it (“The One You Love” on Want Two, Track 8 on your CD). His first album was almost entirely written about a boy named Danny (“Danny Boy”), a straight man whom he had sexual and emotional relations with. By doing so, this is the way he finds closure, by “writing them off” in a sense.
“The Art Teacher” is written in the key of G flat major, though the stability of the key is hard to recognize. Right from the start, there is a sense of searching, longing, being that there is no home for the key area. The tonic only arrives at the end of each verse. As it was in “This Love Affair”, there is no chorus, but there is a bridge. There are four verses, the bridge, and then the final return of one last verse. The first two verses are written in the same fashion. The third and fifth versus both end in a climax. The fourth verse is either played by the piano or allows the horn solo. This horn solo’s been said to relate to Paul McCartney’s “For No One”, a piano-song that features a horn solo during the same duration of the song.
His use of language and where he placed it is entirely important to the song.
There I was in uniform
Looking at the art teacher
I was just a girl then
And never have I love since then
He was not that much older than I was
He had taken our class to the Metropolitan Museum
He asked us what our favorite work of art was
And never could I tell him it was him
Oh I wish I could tell him,
Oh I wish I could’ve told him
I looked at the Ruben’s and Rembrandt’s
I liked the John Singer Sargent’s
He told me he liked Turner
And never have I turned since then
No never have I turned to any other man
{HORN SOLO}
All this having been said
I married an executive company head
All this having been done
A Turner
I own one
And here I am in this uniform
This pantsuit sort-of thing
Thinking of the art teacher
I was just a girl then
And never have I loved since then
No never have I loved any other man
Rufus has a way of painting images with his words. His songs are very visual; they’re painted very well. The image of a schoolgirl is clear, in uniform, dazing at her art teacher with young eyes. He could’ve wrote the lyrics much more foggy as he does in some of his other songs, but the straightforward quality of this song represent youth, a childish love. The bridge represents a dream-like fantasy, which then results right back to the fantasy. In many ways, I believe that the horn implicates thoughts and dreams that wouldn’t be as special if Rufus had added lyrics to the horn solo. This song, in my opinion, represents the picture of a childhood fantasy.
Another song off Want Two that I feel deserves some credit is “Agnus Dei” (Track 8). The Middle Eastern song begins with a cimbalom; a Hungarian instrument made of wood and strings and is played with mallets after some improvisations done on the strings of a violin. There is a long wait until Rufus enters the “piece”, one minute and thirty seconds to be exact. His phrasing is impetrative, particularly in this song. His phrasing is so stretched out that at times, you feel out of breath just by listening. I find this to be very true also in the song “Natasha” (Track 3 on your CD). His long phrases always represent the song, not his voice, which I think is very important to the style of his writing. Most or many of his songs are about longing. In “Agnus Dei”, in particular, it is the sense of longing for the days and times when we’ll, as a country and a whole, live in peace. “Agnus Dei” was written around the beginning of the war with Iraq. “Agnus Dei means Lamb of God in Latin, and it’s sentiment of forgiveness of our worldly sins, give us a peace, couldn’t be more perfect in the world today. I think we need some divine intervention...I think we’ll get it” (Rufus Wainwright). Having Rufus “cover” “Agnus Dei” truly gives the listener an idea of his education. Rufus was in love with Masses and Requiems and also a huge fan of Opera. All of his likes filter into his music, but obviously in this case, his ideas are much more centered.
“Agnus Dei” was written entirely in an Indian style. The whole song is to sound improvised, to a minimum, but more than that, free. When the bass line enters moving in contrary motion, Rufus’ influences on opera are exposed. His melodic line is very opera-esque, reaching his climax toward the end of the piece, the length in which the notes are held, and the struggle you feel before finally reaching the climax. When the song finally moves to a dominant key, the optimism portrayed is absolutely freeing and uplifting. The song cadences in a plagal cadence, more appropriately called the “amen” cadence.
In every Rufus Wainwright song, there is a story to be told. After doing some analyzing of his pieces, I’ve found many interesting facts. Rufus Wainwright wrote “I Don’t Know What It Is” (Want One) [Track 10 on your CD] with over 30 usages of the Golden Section, most being cued by the drums, more specifically, the cymbals. The song involved three orchestras and over one hundred and fifty vocal tracks on the recording. In “Oh What a World” (Want One) [Track 11 on your CD], Rufus sings over the theme from “Bolero” which reveals itself by the very end of the song. The song has three choruses; all repeating themselves, but the orchestration thickens and thickens until it explodes with sound. Also involving the power of his “full” and complete songwriting, here is a sample of “Go or Go Ahead” (Want One) [Track 12].
This is a song that I’d love to analyze, but to be perfectly honest, the song means too much to me to tear it apart. The strength that comes out of the six-minute song is stronger than any siren or scream I’ve ever heard. He writes songs about “hidden places”, such as “Barcelona” (Rufus Wainwright) [Track 13] and “Peach Trees” (Want Two) [Track 14], though both locations are entirely tangible. He writes politically in songs like “Liberty Cabbage” (live recording) [Track 15] and “Gay Messiah” (Want Two) [Track 16]. Rufus Wainwright is an artist who expresses his mind, heart, and soul into his music and obviously just wants love in return.
Rufus Wainwright is a passionate man whose intensity pours out in his songwriting and becomes a part of the music, which then in return, becomes a part of the listener creating a full experience of what it is to love music. For one of the most talented singer-songwriters of our time, it’s upsetting to think of his music as something that is hidden and secretive. For those of us who were introduced to his music, have fallen in love with his music, find that “listening to Rufus Wainwright is one of life’s finest pleasures” – Nelly Furtado. Rufus has become a household name in music lovers’ homes, but to the world, he’s still a mere shadow. One day, Rufus Wainwright’s music will explode into the ears and hearts worldwide and finally, there will be some class to popular music.
if there were any mistakes, please let me know.
:)
fans of rufus,
many entires ago, i had asked the community if anyone had
known anything particular about rufus wainwright, being that i
was writing a paper on him. with your help & the help of passion,
my paper is complete & i figured i would post it here just incase
anyone had an interest in doing some "summer reading"
on our one man guy.
Rufus Wainwright has changed the shape, dynamic, style, structure, and texture of popular music. He has been said to be the best singer-songwriter of our time by his friend Elton John. Sting classified his music as “Sophisticated Pop”, others coining such terms as “Popera” and “Baroque Pop”. Songwriters of higher fame are fans of his music, his talent, and his ability to share with the world the secrets he keeps on the outer shell of his heart.
Rufus Wainwright was born on July 22, 1973 in Rhinebeck, New York to his folk singer parents Loudon Wainwright III and Kate McGarrigle who divorced a few short years after him and his sister, Martha, were born. He started playing the piano at the age of 6 and was inspired by musicals as a small child. At the age of thirteen, he performed his song, “I’m Running” in the movie Tommy Tricker and the Stamp Traveler, also playing a small role. His song earned him a nomination for the Genie Award for Best Original Song and earned him a nomination for the 1990 Juno Award for Most Promising Male Vocalist. It was only a year after that when Rufus came out as a homosexual. At the age of 14, Rufus went to many gay bars and has said of himself that he looked like a “young fourteen.” After picking up a man at a bar, Rufus was raped in London’s Hyde Park, which he only survived by pretending to be an epileptic going into a seizure. Of course, being that it was the 80’s, Rufus remained celibate for seven years afraid that he had gotten the AIDS virus.
When Rufus began performing, he tried to “make it” in New York. He went to Sine’s where Jeff Buckley was currently performing. After being rejected numerous amounts of time, he went back to Montreal, the city in which he was raised by his mother, and cut a series of demo tapes (On your CD, Track 1 is a recording of “Danny Boy” from the demo tape he sent to Sine’s). The demo tape that he sent out to Sine’s was the one that found its way into the hands of Lenny Waronker, the executive for DreamWorks, by the help of his father, Loudon. The label signed him and soon after released his first album, Rufus Wainwright, in the spring of 1998. The album was very successful in Canada and Rolling Stone magazine said for it to be one of the best albums of the year. During the recording of Poses, his second album, which was released in 2001, Rufus began using drugs heavily. His drug use never got in the way of his work. His mother said of his drug use that it was, “never to self destruct.” His album was, again, successful in Canada but not as much in the States. His first American exposure came when Rufus opened for Tori Amos in 2001 and 2002.
In between Poses and Want One, Rufus Wainwright called his friend, Elton John, for advice on his drug using after having a realization that he was losing his mind (he temporarily went blind). He quickly checked himself into rehab. Once Rufus became sober, he had found that he had written approximately thirty songs in his head during his drug abuse. The result has been two of his most successful albums, Want One and Want Two. Since the start of his career, Rufus has recorded on 48 albums and is only mildly successful in the United States.
The first song I’d like to talk about is from Want Two, his latest album. Rufus Wainwright is known musically for not writing a distinctive chorus in his songs. In “This Love Affair” (Track 2 on your CD), there are five versus with no chorus and no distinctive bridge. Each verse has differences, but it is clearly heard in the form of verse 1, verse 2, verse 3, verse 3’, and verse 2’.
I don’t know what I’m doing
I don’t know what I’m saying
I don’t know why I’m watching all these white
people dancing
I don’t know where I’m going
But I do know that I’m walking, where?
I don’t know, just away from this love affair
I can’t say that I’m cruisin’,
Not that I don’t like cruisin’,
Just that I’m bruisin’ from you
I can’t say that I’m waltzin’
Not that I don’t like waltzin’
Would rather be waltzin’ with you
So I guess that I’m going
I guess that I am walking. Where?
I don’t know, just away from this love affair
At the end of each phrase, there is a cadence of some kind, answering the questions that he asks in his lyrics. The lyrics represent confusion, but the music is entirely straightforward. All of his verses end in a retransition so that there is no feeling of a chorus or bridge to come.
“This Love Affair” was written in b flat minor. The form is simple in the sense that it begins with the tonic, moves slowly to the dominant, and falls right back to the tonic. The harmony reminds me of two sounds: the first being a chant and the second, a slow tango, per say. The B section, verses two and five, briefly give us the idea that we’re moving to D flat major, but are unable to resist the dominant in b minor. This same thing happens in the C section, versus three and four, but work in the opposite direction, working or pulling towards the key of the subdominant. Along with the harmony, the rhythm also has a sense of repetition, being that he uses this same rhythm in “Natasha” (Want One), “Cigarettes and Chocolate Milk” (Poses) and “As in Happy” (live performance) [Tracks 3, 4 and 5 on your CD]. It is known that his mother first used it in her song “Entre la Jeunesse et las Sagesse.” There is hardly any decoration in his accompaniment for it is a style of Rufus Wainwright’s to keep the piano simple vamp, for example, “Maker Makes” (Track6).
One of Rufus’ most expressive, yet still intricate songs is from Want Two entitled “The Art Teacher” (Track 7 on your CD). This was recorded live and the baritone solo was added afterwards, but Rufus Wainwright felt no need to “fancy” it up. The night before he began writing “The Art Teacher”, he and his producer went to a Philip Glass performance. His producer later said that he could see something turning in Rufus’ mind. The next day, he heard Rufus playing extremely similar repetitive rhythms on the piano, a style very much linked to and reflective of Philip Glass. The content of the song is written in the perspective of a small girl who has a crush on her art teacher. During a live concert at the Beacon Theater, Rufus prefaced this song by saying, “...hopefully by the end of the song, you’ll realize that the little girl is me.” He had met an art teacher at the gym and it was very common for Rufus to fall in love with straight men and write about it (“The One You Love” on Want Two, Track 8 on your CD). His first album was almost entirely written about a boy named Danny (“Danny Boy”), a straight man whom he had sexual and emotional relations with. By doing so, this is the way he finds closure, by “writing them off” in a sense.
“The Art Teacher” is written in the key of G flat major, though the stability of the key is hard to recognize. Right from the start, there is a sense of searching, longing, being that there is no home for the key area. The tonic only arrives at the end of each verse. As it was in “This Love Affair”, there is no chorus, but there is a bridge. There are four verses, the bridge, and then the final return of one last verse. The first two verses are written in the same fashion. The third and fifth versus both end in a climax. The fourth verse is either played by the piano or allows the horn solo. This horn solo’s been said to relate to Paul McCartney’s “For No One”, a piano-song that features a horn solo during the same duration of the song.
His use of language and where he placed it is entirely important to the song.
There I was in uniform
Looking at the art teacher
I was just a girl then
And never have I love since then
He was not that much older than I was
He had taken our class to the Metropolitan Museum
He asked us what our favorite work of art was
And never could I tell him it was him
Oh I wish I could tell him,
Oh I wish I could’ve told him
I looked at the Ruben’s and Rembrandt’s
I liked the John Singer Sargent’s
He told me he liked Turner
And never have I turned since then
No never have I turned to any other man
{HORN SOLO}
All this having been said
I married an executive company head
All this having been done
A Turner
I own one
And here I am in this uniform
This pantsuit sort-of thing
Thinking of the art teacher
I was just a girl then
And never have I loved since then
No never have I loved any other man
Rufus has a way of painting images with his words. His songs are very visual; they’re painted very well. The image of a schoolgirl is clear, in uniform, dazing at her art teacher with young eyes. He could’ve wrote the lyrics much more foggy as he does in some of his other songs, but the straightforward quality of this song represent youth, a childish love. The bridge represents a dream-like fantasy, which then results right back to the fantasy. In many ways, I believe that the horn implicates thoughts and dreams that wouldn’t be as special if Rufus had added lyrics to the horn solo. This song, in my opinion, represents the picture of a childhood fantasy.
Another song off Want Two that I feel deserves some credit is “Agnus Dei” (Track 8). The Middle Eastern song begins with a cimbalom; a Hungarian instrument made of wood and strings and is played with mallets after some improvisations done on the strings of a violin. There is a long wait until Rufus enters the “piece”, one minute and thirty seconds to be exact. His phrasing is impetrative, particularly in this song. His phrasing is so stretched out that at times, you feel out of breath just by listening. I find this to be very true also in the song “Natasha” (Track 3 on your CD). His long phrases always represent the song, not his voice, which I think is very important to the style of his writing. Most or many of his songs are about longing. In “Agnus Dei”, in particular, it is the sense of longing for the days and times when we’ll, as a country and a whole, live in peace. “Agnus Dei” was written around the beginning of the war with Iraq. “Agnus Dei means Lamb of God in Latin, and it’s sentiment of forgiveness of our worldly sins, give us a peace, couldn’t be more perfect in the world today. I think we need some divine intervention...I think we’ll get it” (Rufus Wainwright). Having Rufus “cover” “Agnus Dei” truly gives the listener an idea of his education. Rufus was in love with Masses and Requiems and also a huge fan of Opera. All of his likes filter into his music, but obviously in this case, his ideas are much more centered.
“Agnus Dei” was written entirely in an Indian style. The whole song is to sound improvised, to a minimum, but more than that, free. When the bass line enters moving in contrary motion, Rufus’ influences on opera are exposed. His melodic line is very opera-esque, reaching his climax toward the end of the piece, the length in which the notes are held, and the struggle you feel before finally reaching the climax. When the song finally moves to a dominant key, the optimism portrayed is absolutely freeing and uplifting. The song cadences in a plagal cadence, more appropriately called the “amen” cadence.
In every Rufus Wainwright song, there is a story to be told. After doing some analyzing of his pieces, I’ve found many interesting facts. Rufus Wainwright wrote “I Don’t Know What It Is” (Want One) [Track 10 on your CD] with over 30 usages of the Golden Section, most being cued by the drums, more specifically, the cymbals. The song involved three orchestras and over one hundred and fifty vocal tracks on the recording. In “Oh What a World” (Want One) [Track 11 on your CD], Rufus sings over the theme from “Bolero” which reveals itself by the very end of the song. The song has three choruses; all repeating themselves, but the orchestration thickens and thickens until it explodes with sound. Also involving the power of his “full” and complete songwriting, here is a sample of “Go or Go Ahead” (Want One) [Track 12].
This is a song that I’d love to analyze, but to be perfectly honest, the song means too much to me to tear it apart. The strength that comes out of the six-minute song is stronger than any siren or scream I’ve ever heard. He writes songs about “hidden places”, such as “Barcelona” (Rufus Wainwright) [Track 13] and “Peach Trees” (Want Two) [Track 14], though both locations are entirely tangible. He writes politically in songs like “Liberty Cabbage” (live recording) [Track 15] and “Gay Messiah” (Want Two) [Track 16]. Rufus Wainwright is an artist who expresses his mind, heart, and soul into his music and obviously just wants love in return.
Rufus Wainwright is a passionate man whose intensity pours out in his songwriting and becomes a part of the music, which then in return, becomes a part of the listener creating a full experience of what it is to love music. For one of the most talented singer-songwriters of our time, it’s upsetting to think of his music as something that is hidden and secretive. For those of us who were introduced to his music, have fallen in love with his music, find that “listening to Rufus Wainwright is one of life’s finest pleasures” – Nelly Furtado. Rufus has become a household name in music lovers’ homes, but to the world, he’s still a mere shadow. One day, Rufus Wainwright’s music will explode into the ears and hearts worldwide and finally, there will be some class to popular music.
if there were any mistakes, please let me know.
:)
