‘Creativity helps to fend off the darker angels always hanging around the corner’

Rufus Wainwright talks to Jude Rogers about life under Donald Trump and why he'll never mention Brexit again

- Jude Rogers

It’s 8.30am in LA’s Laurel Canyon, and in his crimson-walled, book-lined living room, Rufus Wainwright is fitting me into his manic week. He asks if he can turn off the camera to collapse as he relates what’s ahead: New York for the weekend, Stockholm to sing in a production of his 2009 opera, Prima Donna, then “zipping it” over to Wales, where he once produced an album and had a night out he will only describe as “wild”. “Going to gay clubs in Cardiff was quite the journey,” he says, his tone twinkling.

To top it off he then plays at Llais, a week-long celebration of storytelling and singing as part of the city’s wider Cardiff Music City Festival. It sounds knackering, I say. “I’m just living my showbiz life!” he responds, full of beans.

He certainly never seems to stop. This year, he’s also released the soundtrack to Dream Requiem, his 2024 classical work with Meryl Streep as its starry narrator, inspired by the devastation of the Covid-19 pandemic and climate crisis, and which premiered in Paris’s Auditorium de Radio France. And in November, he releases with the Pacific Jazz Orchestra I’m A Stranger Myself: Wainwright Does Weill, a set of 12 songs by the visionary early 20th-century German-American composer Kurt Weill. Weill, who alongside his fellow collaborator Bertolt Brecht, revolutionised high brow art-forms for the general public, has been a lifelong inspiration for Wainwright. “He achieved what I'd ultimately like to do as an artist,” he says. “Bringing opera together with popular music, classical singing with everyday life.”