Transcript
00:00:03
Speaker 1: It's not a perfect piece, but in a strange way, that kind of makes me enjoy it more because you can see how it could evolve into something like that.
00:00:11
Speaker 2: It's emanating from it. It's a live the piece.
00:00:14
Speaker 3: I can't wait. I don't want perfection. Perfection should actually go in a big hole in the back garden.
00:00:19
Speaker 4: Yeah, along with the words should hello, I'm mini driver. I've always loved Preust's questionnaire. It was originally in nineteenth century parlor game where players would ask each other thirty five questions aimed at revealing the other player's true nature. In asking different people the same set of questions, you can make observations about which truths appear to be universal. And it made me wonder, what if these questions were just the jumping off point, what greater depths would be revealed if I asked these questions as conversation starters. So I adapted Prus's questionnaire and I wrote my own seven questions that I personally think are pertinent to a person's story. They are when and where were you happiest? What is the quality you like least about yourself? What relationship, real or fictionalized, defines love for you? What question would you most like answered, what person, place, or experience has shaped you the most? What would be your last meal? And can you tell me something in your life that's grown out of a personal disaster. And I've gathered a group of really remarkable people, ones that I am honored and humbled to have had the chance to engage with. You may not hear their answers to all seven of these questions. We've whittled it down to which questions felt closest to their experience, or the most surprising, or created the most fertile ground to connect. My guest today is the musician and composer Rufus Wainwright. I remember waking up super hungover in the early summer of nineteen ninety eight. Elliot Smith had been sleeping on my sofa, and we went down to this old diner called the One oh One, which was near where I used to live, and we listened to Rufus's self titled first album on my CD Walkman leaning in so we both had a headphone. I remember how much we loved a song called April Fools and how that record became the anthem of our summer. Then I used to see Rufus at the Chelsea Hotel where my aunt Serena Bass used to have a bar, and when his next record Poses came out, I always wanted to go up to him and tell him how his music spoke and gave voice to a part of myself. I couldn't articulate. I never did, though. He's been one of the most diversely prolific artists of the past twenty five years, in my opinion, writing operas and musicals, setting Shakespeare's sonnets to music, and writing songs that hum with a kind of raw Americana that reaches out into folk music but is really an invention all of his own. I am so happy I got to talk to him today, and I hope you love our conversation as much as I do. I was talking with Sam the other time. Yes, we were talking about our mutual adoration.
00:03:07
Speaker 2: Yes, yes, I know, I know we've all.
00:03:09
Speaker 1: Sam and I have both just been through, you know, the whirlwind of the British of the British press with Also, you know, I just came back from London because I put on my first musical. I'm very happy with the piece. I don't think it's necessarily finished. I will say though, that experiencing the kind of English press and how they just once they kind of find a little crack or anything. It's just amazing how it just it's becomes like a blood sport between all the different papers, and you know, certain people are you know, so so so whatever. So it's it's uh and I know with samso movie, it's it's it's it's a it's a really brutal world over there in that in that sense, so so yeah.
00:03:55
Speaker 2: Well but I still love England.
00:03:57
Speaker 4: So oh my god.
00:03:59
Speaker 3: I know I have only ever really been at the hands of the British press, and it is there is honestly nowhere more that likes blood letting more.
00:04:10
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, it's astonishing. Love.
00:04:13
Speaker 3: Well, I'm going to crack on with these questions, and I'm so grateful that you're here.
00:04:17
Speaker 4: Thank you.
00:04:22
Speaker 3: What relationship, real or fictionalized, defines love for you?
00:04:27
Speaker 1: Well, I mean, the greatest love I have to say, or I hate to say it, but I don't hate to say it, are with some dead composers. For me, I really I have this inordinate love for opera composers, especially Verdi and even you know, we went to see a Puccini opera the other day in New York, and I had a similar reaction or Mahler or any of these great composers, because it is, I don't know, I can always go to them and listen to their music and be comforted by their spirit and their artists offerings, and it always does the trick, you know, it always does the trick. So I think my love for great composers, that really is what keeps me going in a lot of ways.
00:05:09
Speaker 4: Wow, is it the turnd do that you just thought?
00:05:13
Speaker 2: No, I saw you.
00:05:16
Speaker 3: My partner's mother is a lifelong Metropolitan opera goer.
00:05:22
Speaker 2: Oh wow.
00:05:23
Speaker 4: And she took him backstage. She took him on at all.
00:05:27
Speaker 3: And Henry, who's fifteen, said that they were bringing up the Zephyr early sets and actually.
00:05:33
Speaker 4: Getting to see them. And he said, watching the sets coming up and on the hydraulics and then hearing these opera singers warming up, he said, it was the most incredible feeling. And he has no reference.
00:05:48
Speaker 3: He's never been to the opera, he'd never been backstage at the Metropolitan, so there was something really extraordinary about kind of seeing it through his Oh.
00:05:57
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, no, no, No. Opera houses have always been my trick, My Catheeds was.
00:06:01
Speaker 4: Like, yeah, now, why do you think that is?
00:06:03
Speaker 1: I mean, that happened early for me. And it's interesting because I composed a requiem mass that's premiering in Paris on the fourteenth of June. It's called the Dream Requiem, and there's actually lots of singers and soprano. There's also a narrator in it because there's a Byron poem that kind of interweaves through it. And actually Meryl Streep is going to be the narrator. Yeah, so she's coming in for that, So we're going to do that concert. So it's exciting. But that's all because when I was thirteen, I heard Veriti's Requiem for the first time. My mother brought it home and we listened to it together, my mother and my aunt, the three of us did, and it just by the end of that two hour stint, I was a complete opera fanatic. It was like my own requiem in a lot of ways of my childhood and I just started going to operas all the time. It was nineteen eighty seven or so, and I knew I was gay, and you know, AIDS was everywhere, and it was a pretty brutal world.
00:06:57
Speaker 2: So opera. I don't know.
00:06:58
Speaker 1: It became my salvation in a lot of ways, just both the music and going to the opera house to seeing the sets and the singers and so forth.
00:07:05
Speaker 4: That's so funny.
00:07:06
Speaker 3: At my school you had to be in the choir and thirty's Requiem was the first piece that I learned.
00:07:12
Speaker 2: That's a pretty good one.
00:07:14
Speaker 3: By the way, starters you mean to go on, I thought they were all that good. I know that you're the child of musicians, But why do you think it was composers?
00:07:24
Speaker 4: Do you think it's because it was separate?
00:07:27
Speaker 1: What I love about the whole concept of being a composer, and this is, you know, being a traditional Western classical music composer is the trajectory, you know. I think it was Beethoven when he died. You know, he was obviously very sick and deaf, and apparently right before he died there was some thunder lightning and he kind of stood up and it was like he was trying to conduct it, you know, and then he died.
00:07:52
Speaker 2: And look, he arguably wrote.
00:07:53
Speaker 1: The most incredible music near the end of his life, like the last Quartets and the Misa Solemnis and stuff like that. In the Ninth Symphony, and that tends to be the goal for composers, is that you write the greatest stuff before you die, and most of them are like that. You know, Strauss's Four Last Songs or Verity's False Staff, you know, all of these great works. So I guess it's the trajectory that I admire, and this kind of constant deepening of your palette and trying to really make it better each time, which, of course the pop world is so lacking and has always been.
00:08:25
Speaker 2: You know, that's more.
00:08:26
Speaker 1: About youth and vigor and what's the hottest thing on the block right now, So it's an antidote to.
00:08:30
Speaker 2: That for me.
00:08:31
Speaker 4: My god, I'm thinking about you talking about having.
00:08:34
Speaker 3: Suffered whatever British press reactions to the musical that you've written, but you're answering that by going to Paris to perform a requiem written with Meryl Street narrating it. To me, it feels like that's the trajectory that you're talking about. It's not chasing the white hot popularity contest music.
00:08:54
Speaker 1: Yeah, And what's interesting about the requiem is that is that, like Verity, what I'm hoping is that, you know, if the piece does well, there's really pre requiem and post requiem for verity. After he wrote that piece, he became a much better composer because doing a religious piece you.
00:09:12
Speaker 2: Have to go to this other dimension.
00:09:15
Speaker 1: I mean, I'm not particularly religious per se, though I was a little shocked by how well it all fits, like all the Latin texts and the prayers and stuff like, it's all in there. But nonetheless, even if you're not a religious person, if you're writing religious music, you know, you have to at least try to believe in something.
00:09:36
Speaker 3: Yeah yeah, wait, did it encourage you to believe more in some Yeah?
00:09:43
Speaker 2: No, I question.
00:09:44
Speaker 1: I mean I was never baptized, but I had to go to church, you know, because of school and stuff as a kid. But I did have thoughts of maybe, you know, getting baptized just for the hell of it. But then I did go to church a few times, like over Christmas, I went to midnight Mass, and I was reminded of how boring.
00:09:59
Speaker 2: It was.
00:10:01
Speaker 1: And how I really don't like the whole actually being in church and all of that stuff.
00:10:06
Speaker 2: I find it needs an update, major updates.
00:10:11
Speaker 1: I love it, an update, but the prayers themselves and the stories and also Jesus.
00:10:17
Speaker 2: I think there are.
00:10:18
Speaker 1: Things that Jesus professed which we need to actually really start, you know, thinking about.
00:10:24
Speaker 3: I think perhaps also we need our approach to be updated.
00:10:28
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I think all of that.
00:10:31
Speaker 4: Could we need a little.
00:10:32
Speaker 2: Bit, Yeah, yeah, we need we love.
00:10:35
Speaker 4: Less Didge. Where and when were you happiest?
00:10:56
Speaker 2: I would say.
00:10:59
Speaker 1: Probably a few months ago when I had nothing to do in the evening and I was just having dinner with my husband and our thirteen year old daughter, Viva, and we were just talking about the day, and then afterwards we played the game of Uno. And I think that fundamentally, it's when I've been happiest. You know, those nights are few and far between because I work so much. But I just hit fifty And what I'm realizing is that, you know, when you're happiest is not necessarily when you're happiest that's good meaning, that's sort of you know, the euphoria of being happy is tricky. But when there's this sort of there's a moment of peace and calm and and just beauty, I guess that I think is true happiness, even though it's not you know, ecstatic. So yeah, because the ecstatic thing always I love it, obviously, but it also you know, I've had a lot of ecstatic moments when in fact I was very unhappy without sort ofly knowing it.
00:12:00
Speaker 3: I wonder if that is something that comes with age, because it was the same with love. It was like love had to be ecstatic or I didn't recognize it as love. And the same with happiness, and I think there's such a what's the word.
00:12:14
Speaker 4: Maybe it's mellowing?
00:12:16
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, around.
00:12:17
Speaker 3: Happiness and love. It's not less, it's ten times more, but not be.
00:12:22
Speaker 2: And it's what you refer back to.
00:12:23
Speaker 1: I mean, you know, the touching moments in my life are when I think of those evenings of just me and my husband and my daughter having a nice meal together, how important that is, and how great that is, and how thankful I am for that, and how happy I am in that space.
00:12:38
Speaker 4: Can I ask you about writing from that space?
00:12:41
Speaker 2: Yes?
00:12:41
Speaker 3: Yes, Like, is it harder to write from a happy place than it is from a sad place?
00:12:46
Speaker 1: Well, look, I was kind of licking some of my wounds from some of what the press said about Opening Night and really went to a dark place, and then all of a sudden, all I could do was write another song, you know, And I started writing this other song and I think it's quite good, and it was a bit like, you know, you just got to move on to the next thing. And it did come from strife. So I mean, I don't want to say that.
00:13:15
Speaker 2: I don't know.
00:13:16
Speaker 1: Unfortunately, I think artists have to always kind of put themselves through all of it.
00:13:20
Speaker 2: I don't know. I'd like to let go of that notion. I don't know. There's a grain of truth in there. Yeah, So I don't know. I agree, No, I agree.
00:13:28
Speaker 3: I always think about Joni Mitchell, about her blowing up her relationship and then writing Blue because she was just too happy and too yeah yeah, was too beautiful as we yeah yeah, yeah yeah.
00:13:41
Speaker 1: I think being fundamentally happy and in a good place isn't necessarily conducive with great art. But I could be wrong, and I'm willing to also accept that if I am, hopefully.
00:13:56
Speaker 4: What is the quality you like least about yourself?
00:14:00
Speaker 1: My lack of initiative and kind of terms of the heart meaning that I I don't know. I think with the arts and with artistic pursuits and even with my career, I'm pretty good at shooting the arrow where it needs to go. But in terms of my personal life and so forth, I seem to have like this delayed reaction to everything. You know, I'll only realize three or four days later that I've been hurt emotionally or that I've done something a bit off, you know. And there are moments where I kind of know that I'm saying something or someone is saying something to me that's not productive, and I just sort of clam up. It's like a defense mechanism, and I just was in the moment I could actually say what I feel, and say what I need, and say what I really want and just you know, get to the meat of the matter. So that's what I hate about myself sometimes.
00:14:53
Speaker 4: Wow, that's interesting, the delay. But it's that it's not you thinking later, oh what I said about that person or to that person, but rather also for yourself. Like that's really interesting you saying I didn't know that i'd been hurt.
00:15:07
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah yeah.
00:15:09
Speaker 3: With things that you find difficult about yourself, do you consciously work on them when they're not actually happening, or do you notice them when they do and go shit, I got to get to that.
00:15:20
Speaker 1: Well, I found more now and once again, I'm still referring to this experience I had of putting on a musical.
00:15:27
Speaker 4: Do you talk about it? It's very fresh.
00:15:28
Speaker 1: So I've gone through that experience and now I find just now I'm back to life and back to normal quote unquote existence. Yes, there are things that you know, with bringing up a child, or being married, or or dealing with you know, financial things, you know, nuts and bolts of life that I'm like, I got to just deal with this right now. You know, I can't blank out here, and it's easy for me to just lie in my bed and oh, I'm this tortured artist who has no room for anything else but creativity in my mind. But the truth is that you actually should probably you know, express this, And so I kind of slip into the artist mood to kind of avert some just normal things in life which would eventually bites you in the ass.
00:16:17
Speaker 3: Well, as my dad said, you never run up a bar tab you don't eventually have to pay.
00:16:23
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's horribly.
00:16:26
Speaker 1: It's horrible, and I think especially now because you know, because we have a thirteen year old daughter and she's amazing, but it's a really treacherous road right now bringing up kids and yeah it is, and you've got to really be on the ball and be ready to act immediately.
00:16:39
Speaker 4: Real quickly.
00:16:40
Speaker 3: I agree, I agree, I mean it does it forces you to be like vigilantly present having a teenager.
00:16:47
Speaker 2: I'm so I'm trying to do that.
00:16:52
Speaker 4: What question would she most like answered?
00:16:56
Speaker 1: I would say, oh god, I'm going to kind of go for the million dollar one. You know what happens after death? Yeah, you know, it's the one question that nobody has the answer to.
00:17:08
Speaker 4: So do you think it would make your life better if you knew?
00:17:13
Speaker 2: I don't know.
00:17:13
Speaker 1: It's something that and this goes back to like the composer thing is that is that you know, when you listen to that music, which is still so alive and still grappling with all of those big feelings and philosophies, there's always something screaming out from beyond the grave, you know, like come to me, or I know there's messages coming from there.
00:17:33
Speaker 2: You know that I hear loud and clear.
00:17:36
Speaker 1: I Mean, I can't say what they are exactly, but I'm very attuned to the other world. And if anything is just to like calm me down a little bit so I can focus on something else.
00:17:49
Speaker 3: I love it, So you'd like to know so that you can just relax a little.
00:17:53
Speaker 2: Yeah, but I don't think we'll ever know.
00:17:57
Speaker 4: No, I don't. I don't. I don't know that we will eat. But you're sure. I think you're right. You can feel it?
00:18:03
Speaker 2: Yeah, oh yeah, no, I feel it all the time.
00:18:05
Speaker 4: Do you have a right from that place?
00:18:06
Speaker 2: Oh? Yeah, right from that place all the time.
00:18:08
Speaker 1: I mean in my pieces, there's often references to death and whether it's gleeful or sad, I don't know. I think that's probably my Irish side, you know, from the mcgaragyll side.
00:18:20
Speaker 4: Do you think that a requiem could be happy?
00:18:26
Speaker 2: Oh yes, very much so mine isn't those.
00:18:31
Speaker 4: Sadly, it definitely could be mine.
00:18:33
Speaker 1: It's when I think of happy requiems per se, I mean, I love for by the way.
00:18:38
Speaker 4: That's the one that was the second one that I learned to sing.
00:18:41
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:18:44
Speaker 4: It has a very happy middle.
00:18:46
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, has moments like that, and Mozart's requiem has a sort of sense of relief and peace. Mine the end especially is a little bit more spooky because it's a bit like where are we going?
00:19:00
Speaker 2: Where is this leading?
00:19:01
Speaker 4: Well, in terms of you wondering where are we going?
00:19:04
Speaker 1: Or yeah, well that's are we being led to salvation? Or are we being led to a living or are we being led to hell? There's a real question mark at the end of mine. It ends with like a child's chorus and they're kind of being led off. But it could also be like the pie piper.
00:19:19
Speaker 4: Oh that's creepy. I like it. Yeah, that's super creepy. So actually your answer to the what question do you most like answered that is something that you ruminate on?
00:19:29
Speaker 1: Is this after Yeah, I think on one end and one thing I'm obsessed with, and I'm also very afraid of it.
00:19:35
Speaker 2: It fascinates me. Do you know?
00:19:36
Speaker 3: I became less frightened of it when my mother died because I keep thinking, if she's there, I have this idea of tethering that because she.
00:19:46
Speaker 4: Was this portal in that there will be some sort of like you know, like the guys doing the sammaphore or me with the aeroplane. I just can imagine her there with headphones on and.
00:19:57
Speaker 3: Like two cons and like a high vis vest, being like in coming this way, this way to paradise.
00:20:03
Speaker 4: Men.
00:20:04
Speaker 1: I had to serve of an opposite experience than that with my mother, because my mother passed away too, about fifteen years ago, but it was her birthday, it was my birthday, sorry, And this was maybe six or seven years after she died. And she wrote this song called Mendocino, which was a beautiful song and it's obviously it takes place in Mendocino, California, where I'd never been. And so I decided to take a trip to Mendocino, my husband and I and we had this little dog named Puccini, this beautiful little dog, and we went to Mendocino and it was gorgeous and it was a wonderful day, and it was my birthday and I sang her song on the beach and we filmed it, and it was this kind of like a happy moment, a little maybe a little bit like what we talked about before, like are you sure you're happy when you're happy? And then the next day our dog was killed by a big dog. We had a little puppy and this big dog killed Puccini in front of us, And there was a definite feeling that I had, and it had to do with my mother. She was like, don't come too close to me now, like it was like, don't tempt death this way. It was very Kate, Wow, it's this fascinats move. And I had moments when I love death and you know when I wish for it certainly.
00:21:35
Speaker 3: So what person, place, or experience most altered your life.
00:21:40
Speaker 1: I would definitely say that when I decided to go to rehab back in the nineties of my own volition, that was an amazing gift of grace that I bestowed upon myself because I wasn't forced to go there and I just kind of packed up everything and I knew I had to get my shit together. I didn't stay sober necessarily the whole time, and it was kind of a rocky road for a while, and it's a battle that you never totally get over. But just having that moment at that point in my life, when I was twenty seven twenty eight, of just saying like, stop the world, I got to take care of myself. I'm stepping out and I'm going to go off and do this was just so valuable. And I say that to this day, like, whether you stay sober or you don't stay sober, if you're able to just stop everything and just totally focus on yourself, one hundred percent nobody else for a good chunk of time. If you're able to do that, then do really take that chance, because it makes all the difference. So I'd say say that was probably a.
00:22:42
Speaker 4: Very very young to have been able to take yourself in hand like that.
00:22:48
Speaker 2: Yeah, it was young.
00:22:49
Speaker 1: I mean there's other It's an interesting thing because I actually had no money at the time. I was pretty or i'd had some success. But what happened is I had done that the song halle for Shrek, and not knowing at all what that meant or anything, just I'd done it in an afternoon because they told me to do it, and then my life was all crazy and I said, you know, I really have to go away to rehab. And then the day after I decided to do that, my first check arrived for Hallelujah, and it was for seventy five dollars and it was the exact amount of money needed to go right into rehab. So it was like my first big check ever was from that song. And that's the other thing is that I think if you really do anything like that profound and it's true, and you really have the intent to try to follow through on it, you know the world will help you get there.
00:23:39
Speaker 2: So I was lucky to have that experience.
00:23:41
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think thatwithstanding the storm and keeping on is is most of the battle.
00:23:49
Speaker 2: Actually, yeah, totally totally.
00:23:56
Speaker 4: What would be your last meal?
00:23:59
Speaker 2: My last meal? Oh my god?
00:24:01
Speaker 1: Yes, it would definitely be Vener schnitzel. First, I would say Vener schnitzel by my husband, because he makes amazing vener schnitzel.
00:24:09
Speaker 4: Is he German or is he Austrians German?
00:24:12
Speaker 1: Yeah, he's German but he but he can make a really good vener stencil. Second though, is the Veener Schnitzel from Delawnay's in London.
00:24:22
Speaker 4: I love from the Delauney that's right.
00:24:25
Speaker 1: They Yeah, they do a great vanis Stinsel there, So it would be a Delaunay vener Sninsel.
00:24:30
Speaker 3: So you'd have double schnitzel. I'm actually double schnitzel. Yeah, husband schnitzel and then they.
00:24:42
Speaker 4: Very good. Now did you like that before you met your husband or is it because he that's a love food?
00:24:50
Speaker 1: Well, I mean I I think I think I knew I loved it, but then you know, subsequently he would make it. But we would also go on these wondrous Viener Schnitzel expeditions, you know, go to Vienna and all that. And also especially there's a great place in Berlin. You probably know, Borchard's.
00:25:04
Speaker 4: I don't know.
00:25:07
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's a great it has an amazing but also especially in the spring, you have it with white asparagus, and that's a big German thing. And and and so the vner Stinsel and white asparagus is you know, that's that's I've died many times, I guess.
00:25:27
Speaker 3: Oh rufus. Thank you so much for answering my question. I want to tell you Phogocracy is one of my most played.
00:25:37
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's great.
00:25:39
Speaker 4: It is, honestly, it's masterful and beautiful. I love the music that you make.
00:25:44
Speaker 2: Thank you, thank you.
00:25:46
Speaker 4: Thank you a million times for doing this.
00:25:48
Speaker 2: Thank you.
00:25:52
Speaker 4: Many Questions. Is hosted and written by Me Mini Driver, Executive produced by Me and Aaron Kaufman, with production support from Jennifer Bassett, Zoey Denkler and Ali Perry. The theme music is also by Me and additional music by Aaron Kaufman. Special banks to Jim Nikolay Addison, O'Day, Henry Driver, Lisa Castella, Annick Oppenheim, a. Nick Muller and Annette Wolfe a w kPr, Will Pearson, Nicki Etoor, Morgan Levoy and mangesh At Tickedore
