Rufus Wainwright acknowledges time, defies time at Heights Theater

Singer Rufus Wainwright Singer Rufus Wainwright Photo: PAUL BERGEN, AFP/Getty Images Photo: PAUL BERGEN, AFP/Getty Images Image 1 of / 1 Caption Close Rufus Wainwright acknowledges time, defies time at Heights Theater 1 / 1 Back to Gallery

Rufus Wainwright was a tousled mess of visual data Thursday night at a packed Heights Theater. His hair was cropped shorter than the old days, but showed no signs of age, unlike his beard, which was a venerable white. His shirt was a beautifully embroidered western shirt that gave off a vibe of the most fabulous Saturday night honky tonker. And his feet were capped with sparkling red (my daughter insists they were pink) loafers. Even Wainwright, between songs, noted physical concessions to time compared to his days of youthful and effortless beauty.

But look, Wainwright is 46 and has been making albums for more than 20 years and making music for most of his life. Each time he opened his mouth and let loose that burnt caramel voice, one could close his or her eyes and feel like it was 1998 all over again.

It’s not. But at times it sounded like it. Other times it didn’t. Not because the music has suffered since he released bracing and beautiful and brilliant “Rufus Wainwright” in 1998 and the even better “Poses” three years later. Wainwright on Thursday offered a generous selection of new songs for a record that has the markings of a classic. His was a generous performance that reveled in the new while showing the twisted path that leads to the present.

That he closed with “Cigarettes and Chocolate Milk” was telling. He was in his twenties when he did that accounting of the way little things capture our attention and then slowly consume us. The song – like Wainwright – doesn’t have easy points of comparison in popular music. Wainwright arrived post-grunge, so like others, he cut a path of his own. And while plenty have trod a sort of offbeat neo-folk path that went from underground (Neutral Milk Hotel, the Decemberists) to the mainstream (Mumford and Sons), Wainwright remains an entity without many imitators: an indie rock guy rooted in cabaret and Canadian singer-songwriters. And while the latter can provoke snickers, he offered up two Leonard Cohen covers – “So Long, Marianne” and “Hallelujah” – that could silence any room, not just the intimate confines of the Heights Theater.

He’s among the weirdest amalgams to surface in popular music. No surprise there: His father, Loudon Wainwright III, is a singer-songwriter/folkie whose narrative approach was always off center compared to the earnestness that typically dictates the form. His mother, Kate McGarrigle, was half of an ethereal duo that started in folk and migrated to airier, more experimental spaces. Wainwright clearly developed an affinity for opera and Broadway, which all courses through his music. And growing up in Canada, well, that’ll inoculate you – at least for a short spell – against the groupthink of the American music industry.

I wouldn’t dare try to pin him down specifically. But getting back to “Cigarettes and Chocolate Milk,” the song has a decisive cabaret vibe and lyrics that shift between a couple of Elliot(t)s: T.S. Eliot (the phrasing of Wainwright’s pensive query about eating jellybeans echoes a famous passage about a peach) and Elliott Smith; the song’s ponderance of “those other things” that are both mentioned and not: The chemicals that are “a little bit stranger, a little bit harder, a little bit deadly.”

I was unable to snare a setlist, but I can say that Wainwright shared a generous amount of music from a spring 2020 release, which is the sort of gambit that can send fans to the bar. Not this night. Much of the new material found that the guy aware of the snares in “Cigarettes” had reached a point of … not contentment … but awareness about navigating adulthood. He referenced his husband and seven-year-old daughter, saying each of them requires a song per album. And the resulting music was aptly reflective of this phase in his life. His music long reflected the thrashing that comes with the present when one is young. These new songs are different: They are threaded with anxiety, too, but also affection for those who keep us tethered.

His youth produced a lot of songs that spoke to qualities of isolation, drift and the sadness that comes with both. The newer songs aren’t void of the sadness – that would be robbing his ridiculous voice of its sustenance – but they have a certain balance that survivors know.

And I should take a moment to address that voice. Having heard voices come and go, I was thrilled to find Wainwright’s remarkable instrument showing no signs of erosion. His ability to hold a note, to bend a note, and control his vibrato are without peer on his sphere. He’s basically a violinist in a major symphony orchestra, only the strings rest between his heart and his skull. I’ve heard singers with greater range, and singers prone to greater histrionics. I’ve not hear a singer who feels his material this way, who exudes that feeling in a manner that is both relatable and seemingly supernatural.

The new record comes out in the spring, and early reports suggest it’s called “Unfollow the Rules,” which seems like it would’ve been a better title for a career-spanning box set. But as he points out, the record industry that launched him is all but dead. So in 10 more years, box sets may transform from quaint to extinct.

Still the fragility and power that are braided together on new songs like “Montauk” and “Peaceful Afternoon” – the former for the daughter, the latter for the husband – find him further unfollowing rules, even as he has long left behind the indulgences of youth.

When I think of artists who hit this level of reflection with new musical ideas, they’re typically in their late-60s and in dire need of a comeback. Wainwright put out an album called “Out of the Game” in 2012, before he was 40. So maybe his return is on a faster track.

Regardless, it was invigorating to see an artist work with such deftness and feeling without a new record to plug, without a brand to really push. He mentioned visiting the Menil earlier in the day, and expressed his affinity for immersing oneself in art.

For an hour and 45 minutes, Wainwright managed to cast such a spell on a crowd that was fortunate to see him on this night.