For flamboyant musician Rufus Wainwright, Toronto’s Luminato Festival is becoming a byword for “tribute concert.” During the 2012 festival, he performed at a concert in honour of his mother, folk singer Kate McGarrigle, who died from cancer three years ago.
This summer he will be on stage at Massey Hall with four other musicians to mark the 70th birthday of Canadian jazz folk legend Joni Mitchell. One more Luminato tribute, and it’ll officially be a trend.
The eclectic two-night tribute will see Wainwright share the stage with Herbie Hancock, Kathleen Edwards, Cold Specks and others. Mitchell herself is scheduled to make an appearance, but, as Wainwright points out, “She’s one of the great figures of the music world and can certainly do whatever she wants.”
Musicians queue up to claim Mitchell’s influence on their work, with everyone from Björk to Taylor Swift sprinkling themselves with the musical fairy dust, but Wainwright’s relationship with her is more ambiguous. Being the scion of another Canadian folk musician, Wainwright says he rarely heard Mitchell’s music on the stereo as a child — that was his mother’s territory and she had “conflicted feelings” toward the “Both Sides Now” singer.
“She really admired her, but on the other hand, she was quite jealous of her,” says Wainwright, who admits his mother was a “crushed by life” type of musician envious of Mitchell’s independent spirit.
But it’ll be his own envy that Wainwright will be trying to keep in check this month. Having lived much of his life in the spotlight since launching his musical career two decades ago, Wainwright acknowledges that playing second fiddle to his husband during the Luminato festivities doesn’t come naturally.
“I find myself struggling at times with the reversal of fortunes,” he says, adding that he’s used to being the “centrepiece.” “But it is good for me,” he continues. “It’s very representative of marriage. You have to give each other their special time.”
The Luminato festival will also be one of the relatively rare moments when Wainwright and Jörn Weisbrodt are in Toronto together. Although the couple recently rented a house in the Annex, their work schedules mean they have little time to enjoy the neighbourhood’s artsy vibe.
Last spring, Wainwright released Out of the Game, his seventh studio album, which impressed critics and peaked at number 11 on the Canadian Albums Chart. Since then, he has been touring relentlessly while Weisbrodt is also frequently out of town trying to track down artists to bring to Luminato.
“I’ve been there a couple of months in total, a few days here, a week there,” says Wainwright of Toronto. “Jörn has to travel a lot, too, so we often end up meeting in these very glamorous places — thanks, Toronto.”
Emphasizing that he has lived in Montreal, London, New York and Los Angeles, the singer also says that, now that he is nearly 40, what he likes about his place in Toronto is the peace and quiet.
“I’m attracted to the bucolic ideal,” he says, waxing lyrical about his love of the serene neighbourhood, playing his piano and quietly sipping a coffee.
Wainwright admits he’ll never be able to kick back and relax in Toronto for long, not least because he has an infant daughter, Viva. Now two years old, she lives in L.A. with her mother, Leonard Cohen’s daughter, Lorca. For Wainwright, fatherhood has created a rich seam to mine in his songwriting.
“I wrote a lot of songs about my daughter right off the bat, even one before she was born,” he says.
But fatherhood has also created some changing life perspectives.
“It broadens my life. It’s immensely relieving to realize she doesn’t care how good my songs are or how good my shows are; it just matters that I’m there and that I am around.”
