Operatic overtures Rufus Wainwright unveils Want Two BY MAC RANDALL

Ask Rufus Wainwright what he’s listening to these days and you’ll get a response that’s both noncommittal and revealing. "I’m not listening to anything right now," the critically lauded singer-songwriter says on the phone from Rome, where he’s wrapping up a European tour, "because I just put out an album and spent weeks and weeks listening to mixes, so my ears are pretty shot. I’m always listening to opera, but that doesn’t seem to interest the world. What’s really exciting me is that after this tour’s over, I’m going to La Fenice to see Lorin Maazel conduct La traviata." That’s Teatro la Fenice, the fabled Venice opera house that just reopened following a devastating 1996 fire, the third such blaze in the theater’s long history; its rise once again from the ashes makes its name — the Italian equivalent of this newspaper’s — exceedingly appropriate.

The 31-year-old Wainwright’s longstanding love of opera is no secret. But never before has it been such a focal point of his own music as it is on the new Want Two (Geffen). Opening with a gripping, Middle Eastern–flavored orchestration of the Latin "Agnus Dei" and closing with a nine-minute choral extravaganza called "Old Whore’s Diet," Want Two is Wainwright’s farthest departure yet from standard pop, the biggest, boldest, most operatic work he’s done. And that’s saying something for a guy whose previous albums — 1998’s Rufus Wainwright, 2001’s Poses, and last year’s Want One (all on DreamWorks) — were all supersize affairs loaded with drama and ambition.

The songs on Want One and Want Two were mostly written around the same time, and the packaging of both discs is similar. Before Want One reached stores in September of 2003, it was rumored that Wainwright had recorded two complete albums’ worth of material in one mammoth session at Bearsville Studios in upstate New York and that he had briefly toyed with putting out a two-CD set but then decided to delay release of half the tracks for a year. It turns out that this wasn’t quite true. "We did a lot more work in the studio [after Want One came out] — about three months’ work in three weeks. I knew that I had Want Two in the bag, but the reality of the situation was that I was lying a lot for the last few months, telling everybody that it was finished. Which was good, because it put the pressure on to actually finish it."

This explains why we got two albums instead of one, but it doesn’t tell us much about why Wainwright decided to put certain songs on one disc rather than the other. For clues to that question, there are the CD booklets. On Want One’s cover, Wainwright posed as a knight in shining armor; on the front of Want Two, he’s a damsel in distress, complete with flowing robes and long, feathery hair. According to him, the dichotomy of the artwork reflects the overall spirit of the respective albums. "The first album is more masculine, confident, exclamatory, whereas the second one’s more feminine, introverted, a little exotic, kind of mysterious. It’s two different sides of my personality."

Of course, the funny outfits also emphasize the theatrical nature of these albums, as do the often extravagant instrumental arrangements. Want Two doesn’t boast anything as attention-getting as the orchestral quotes from Ravel’s Boléro that wittily adorned its predecessor’s opening track, "Oh What a World," but thick layers of strings, reeds, and/or horns blanket nearly every song here, from the mock-Baroque flourishes of "Little Sister" to the Broadway-ready chordal swells of "Crumb by Crumb." The lush backdrops blend well with Wainwright’s voice, which is too grainy-sounding to be conventionally pretty but still conveys a beguiling sort of heroism, especially when he’s pulling his favorite trick of holding out notes in a manner similar to that of his vocal near-double, Radiohead’s Thom Yorke, or of an operatic tenor. "When I was a young adult," he says, "I studied Richard Strauss’s Four Last Songs, and he specifically said that he didn’t want these songs to be sung by an opera singer who’s never loved. I was really struck by that belief that you have to have gone through the mill of emotion to be a proper singer. You need that desperation in your voice, or at least to be aware of it."

Mentioning Strauss is a reminder that the complexity of Wainwright’s music may have something to do with his formidable classical background. By now it’s par for the course to mention that he comes from a musical family; mother Kate McGarrigle and father Loudon Wainwright III (whose fractious relationship with his son is detailed in Want One’s "Dinner at Eight") are folk royalty, and his sister and frequent collaborator Martha has been forging her own promising career. (Want Two’s "Little Sister" was written in part to encourage her.) Yet it’s not as frequently remarked that Rufus took piano lessons for 12 years starting at age six, or that he studied composition at McGill University in his home town of Montreal. In conversation, though, Wainwright plays down his skills in this area. "I did go to music school for about a year and a half," he concedes, "and I picked up quite a few things. But I was a lousy student. At that age, I was more interested in my sideburns and having sex with strangers than in getting an education."

Which leads us, in a round-about way, to the standout track on Want Two, "The Art Teacher." One of the more sparsely arranged songs on the album, oriented around Wainwright’s voice and piano, it recounts a woman’s youthful infatuation with a teacher who introduced her to the beauty of J.M.W. Turner. After repeatedly invoking the unmatchable godliness of this man, she moves into the present: "All this having been said/I married an executive company head/All this having been done/A Turner — I own one/Here I am in this uniformish pant-suit sort of thing/Thinking of the art teacher." In keeping with the words, the melody is a bemused shrug, a bittersweet mix of pride and resignation.

"The Art Teacher" has a basis in Wainwright’s real life. As he explains with a hearty chuckle, "I did have a crush on an art teacher. He wasn’t my art teacher. He was someone I met at the gym and got to see in a compromising position. He was straight, but he wanted to hang out with me ’cause he was a fan, and we had a nice time together, but it was odd. I’ve had a few liaisons like that with straight men who are fans and use their sexual power to get closer but not too close. I usually retaliate by writing a song about them and then discarding them. Because this guy taught at an all-girls’ school, I wrote from the perspective of one of his students. I thought maybe there’d be one last chance where he’d realize I was masking some of my affection, but in the end I had to move on."

Wainwright’s sexuality, it’s clear, is an important subject, and one that he’s not trying to hide. He came out when he was still in his teens, and he’s been as forthright about being gay, both in songs and in interviews, as he’s been about most other subjects, particularly his family and his drug problems (the most notorious of those being an addiction to crystal meth that landed him in rehab a couple of years ago). Homo-erotic themes have been part of his music since his debut, though he’s often couched them in arty terms; the most frequently sung word in Poses’ "Grey Gardens" is "Tadzio," which is the name of the young male object of desire in Thomas Mann’s Der Tod in Venedig. (Between Mann and La traviata, Venice features prominently on this unabashed romantic’s inner map.)

But on Want Two’s "Gay Messiah," Wainwright broadcasts his sexual orientation to a hilarious new extreme, feverishly envisioning the Fire Island arrival, in full ’70s porn regalia, of a special type of personal savior before adding this wry aside: "No, it will not be me/Rufus the baptist I be/No, I won’t be the one/Baptized in cum." For those lyrics, and a few others like them, Want Two has received the Tipper Gore stigmata, also known as a parental-advisory sticker. Rufus can’t help but laugh about this. "Yeah, they’re trying to shield the kiddies from the arts . . . and at the same time, they’re getting rid of their Social Security. You can’t listen to that music and you can’t go to the hospital."

That brings up the subject of George W. Bush, not generally regarded as any gay man’s best friend, and certainly no favorite of Wainwright’s. (The new album’s "Waiting for a Dream" refers to the presence of "an ogre in the Oval Office.") Was he as crestfallen as so many others were by the events of November 2? "Actually, I think if Kerry had won, there would probably have been more inaction from the left. At least now we know for sure that the religious right hates women and homosexuals more than they hate terrorists. I feel sorry for moderate-minded Republicans, because their party has gone to bed with an extremely demanding voting bloc and now they have to go along with fanatics who want to shape policy. It’s the tragedy of victory."

Tragic times call for big, operatic pop music, and with Want One and Want Two, Wainwright has provided. It remains to be seen how he’ll follow up this one-two punch, but he says the creative well’s far from dry: "I’m always writing stuff. I eat, sleep, shit, and write songs, basically. So there’s always a dozen more things ready to go."