Rufus wants us all to participate in a “turn your electricity off” on June 21. He has a webpage describing what is behind this effort, and it is laudable.
And while you’re at it, you can purchase a bust of Rufus for your piano, or your famous composer bust collection.
[I am sitting quietly doing my morning Sudoku puzzle, drinking coffee. It’s 5:30 in the morning. I look up and smell the air: tobacco? patchoulli? old scotch? And an ovoid figure hovers into the room and slowly comes into focus. It is Igor Stravinsky, with sun glasses in a kind of safari outfit with sunglasses, […]
I haven’t played any Rufus Wainwright on the piano for a long time. I decided to sit down and play along with him, so these are the songs I’ll be playing tonight in my private concert. Sing along if ya like! (It’s in alphabetical order, but still makes a interesting playlist.)
Another one of my all time favorite songs is “NSU” by Cream, meaning Eric Clapton, Jack Bruce, Ginger Baker, and a lot of drugs. I loved Cream. The metric/time world of NSU is great fun, much like the opening of Rufus Wainwright’s “Movies of Myself” where the opening figure has very little to do with […]
Two years ago, my brother, Andrew Bourland, and my partner, Daniel Shiplacoff, urged me to start blogging and set me up on a Wordpress platform and away I went. It started originally as Red Black Window, or redblackwindow.com, and then changed to my name after the first year. The first name came from the name […]
Here is a live clip (FIP radio, Paris, France, Nov 17th, 2007.) of Rufus singing a new song about a childhood crush on a friend named Zebulon. A nice return to solo ballads that many of us have missed. I like how he shushes someone chatting while he is trying to start the song. I […]
What a cool find! Joop, of Rufus Wainwright Message Board fame, found a copy of Rufus’s first collection of songs: a cassette that his father aggressively passed out to people to help out his son. Here is the playlist:
Side A
01) Foolish Love
02) Heart Like A Highway (previously known as That Night)
03) Money Song (previously known […]
Cher Rufus,
I hovered over your Judy Garland concert. What a spectacle! You are such a good boy, such a gay boy, and full of life and music. I cannot impose my old fashioned French aesthetic on you, so I applaud you Rufus. Bravo!
Your old, old friend,
Hector Berlioz
PS: I snuck a peak at Bourland’s Rufus book, […]
We went to the Hollywood Bowl with Frank and Terry to hear Rufus Wainwright’s farewell concert to Judy Garland. My longtime readers will remember that we attended the premiere of this show last year in Carnegie Hall. Rufus is clearly more comfortable with all these songs now days although I have the distinct feeling he […]
Hector Berlioz: Happy fall Roger, it has been a long time since we have chatted!
Roger Bourland: Hector! What a surprise! What brings you here? Rufus news?
HB: I trust you are attending his performance of the Judy Garland tribute at the Hollywood Bowl?
RB: Oh yes, I’ve had tickets for a year. We’re going with Frank and […]
I include this video as a kind of blog bookmark in my Rufus Wainwright research. It was captured by someone watching TV in a hotel room and filming it with a video camera. On the TV is Loudon Wainwright III on NBC, show not identified, playing with an unidentified duo (a black man on bass […]
Certain composers’ oeuvre can be thought of as one large composition. Each piece is cut from that large fabric. Composers that come to mind in this category are Edgard Varése and George Crumb. Similarly, there are songwriters who, in addition to penning a popular song, compose song prototypes (for lack of a better word), and […]
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