Given Viva’s musical lineage - Wainwright’s parents are folkies Loudon Wainwright III and the late Kate McGarrigle - it’s no surprise that she’s already displaying an artistic flair. Mom is Lorca Cohen, daughter of the late, legendary Leonard Cohen, who conceived the child through Wainwright’s sperm donation. Now he’s also a dad to 9-year-old daughter Viva. Rufus Wainwright and Jörn Weisbrodt Billy Farrell/BFA.com “I was very set in my ways in terms of, you know, the old-school homosexual habits: drugs or sex or fashion,” he says with a laugh. “And luckily, they’ve also gotten to be love songs.”īut Wainwright wasn’t always big on the idea of gay marriage. “One of his demands is that on every record there’s a song about him,” he says. His at-home performances have been filmed by Jörn Weisbrodt, Wainwright’s husband of eight years, to whom “Peaceful Afternoon” is dedicated on the new album. I just show up in my kimono and pray to God my face is on right.” “Then once COVID hit, was just a real no-brainer. When I was much younger, I did it naked,” he says. Wainwright has kept the music playing during quarantine with his daily #RobeRecitals streamed from his Los Angeles home. “Unfollow the Rules” was supposed to come out in April, but was postponed due to the coronavirus crisis. And now it’s good to be back where people take me seriously and they’re not so mean.” “In the end, I felt honored that they were taking me so seriously by being so mean. But it was also quite brutal … I had to fight tooth and nail to garner respect. “I really felt the need to give back to the opera world for all the inspiration it had given me, and so I went off and wrote a couple of operas and got them produced,” says Wainwright, whose first opera, “Prima Donna,” is due to stage a new production in Stockholm this fall. Rufus Wainwright’s “Unfollow The Rules.” Courtesy “Unfollow the Rules” is Wainwright’s first pop album since 2012, but he’s still been busy making music in classical circles. “I very much consider this album to be a bookend to my first record,” he says.
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And 22 years after his first, self-titled LP, he’s come full circle. It’s fitting that Wainwright’s new album, out Friday, is titled “Unfollow the Rules,” because - from his sexuality to his art-pop aesthetic - the singer-songwriter has always been shaking up the status quo in the music industry. “And on a more serious note, AIDS was still a tremendous threat back then, and I didn’t want to get AIDS and have to lie about it … I never was in the closet. I just was a terrible liar,” Wainwright, 46, tells The Post. “When that happened, I wasn’t really thinking about it in those terms. For Rufus Wainwright, being out was always in - going all the way back to when he made his 1998 debut as a rare, openly gay artist signed to a major label.
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