He relocated to Los Angeles that year and began his first studio album, 1998's Rufus Wainwright. The singer moved to New York City in 1996, performing regularly at Club Fez. Waronker stated the following of Wainwright: "When I was about to listen to his tape, I remember clearly I was thinking, 'Gee, if he has the mom's musicality and smarts, and the dad's smarts and voice, that'd be nice.' Then I put it on and I said, 'Oh, my God, this is stunning.'" Parks sent the recordings to Lenny Waronker, the DreamWorks executive who eventually signed Wainwright to his label. The resulting tapes impressed his father Loudon, who passed them on to his friend Van Dyke Parks.
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Through weekly shows at Cafe Sarajevo, Wainwright was on the Montreal club circuit and eventually cut a series of demo tapes produced by Pierre Marchand, who later produced Wainwright's album Poses. He has been reported to have stated that he remained celibate for five or seven years after the incident, and eventually became promiscuous. Wainwright states that he survived only by pretending to be an epileptic and faking a seizure. I thought it was going to be a romantic walk in the park, but he raped me and robbed me afterwards and tried to strangle me". In an interview years later, he described the event: "I said I wanted to go to the park and see where this big concert was going on. Īt age 14, Wainwright was sexually assaulted in London's Hyde Park after picking up a man at a bar. As a youth he trained at Interlochen Arts Camp, studying classical music. (For instance, the song "Barcelona" features lyrics from the libretto of Giuseppe Verdi's opera, Macbeth.) During this time, he became interested in Édith Piaf, Al Jolson, and Judy Garland. Wainwright became interested in opera during his adolescent years, and the genre strongly influences his music.
Just a sign of many other things to come as well." Wainwright later said in another interview that his "mother and father could not even handle me being gay. "We'd drive around in the car, he'd play ' Heart of Glass' and I'd sort of mouth the words, pretend to be Blondie. In 1999, he told Rolling Stone that his father recognized his homosexuality early on. Wainwright identified as gay while a teenager. He was nominated for a 1990 Juno Award for Most Promising Male Vocalist of the Year. His song "I'm a-Runnin'", which he performed in the film Tommy Tricker and the Stamp Traveller at the age of 14, earned him a nomination for a 1989 Genie Award for Best Original Song. He began playing the piano at age six, and started touring at age 13 with "The McGarrigle Sisters and Family", a folk group featuring Rufus, his sister Martha, his mother Kate, and aunt Anna. He attended high school at the Millbrook School in New York (which would later inspire his song "Millbrook"), and later briefly studied piano at McGill in Montreal. Wainwright has dual US and Canadian citizenship. His father is a descendant of Peter Stuyvesant, the 17th century Dutch governor of New Amsterdam, later New York. His parents divorced when he was three, and he lived with his mother in Montreal for most of his youth. Wainwright was born in Rhinebeck, New York, to folk singers Kate McGarrigle and Loudon Wainwright III.
He has also written two classical operas and set Shakespeare's sonnets to music for a theater piece by Robert Wilson. He has recorded nine albums of original music and numerous tracks on compilations and film soundtracks. Rufus McGarrigle Wainwright (born July 22, 1973) is an American-Canadian singer, songwriter, and composer.