Sep 19, 2003  |  By: BRIAN MOYLAN  | COMMENTS     

LIKE THAT OLD country song, gay musician Rufus Wainwright was looking for love in all the wrong places when he arrived in New York City in the summer of 2002.

“I was going to have the greatest summer of my life in my mind,” Wainwright says about the period before the creation of his newest CD, “Want One,” which hits stores Tuesday, Sept. 23.

“It was supposed to be the summer of love or the summer of forgetting,” he told the Blade this week.

“I came to New York and I got an apartment and I proceeded to do that. And it went in the opposite direction. It was a total nightmare.”

Recently, Wainwright, who is Canadian, has been talking publicly about his time spent on drugs — including crystal meth, ecstasy, cocaine, and ketamine — the anonymous sex he had while on drug binges, and his subsequent month-long stay at a drug rehab center.

In “Go or Go Ahead,” a song on the new album that Wainwright says was inspired by his troubles, he sings: “Guardian angels who left me stranded / It was worth it, feeling abandoned / Makes one hardened but what has happened to love?”

Wainwright, 30, who has been openly gay since he was a teenager, has turned from addiction back to love, one of the themes of his previous two albums — “Poses” in 2001 and his self-titled debut in 1998.

After emerging from rehab, he went into the studio with producer Marius de Vries, who worked with him on the “Moulin Rouge” soundtrack and has collaborated with everyone from David Bowie to Madonna.

What ensued was a productive torrent of songwriting that produced enough tracks for two albums — the current one and “Want Two,” scheduled to be released this spring.

The first installment features Wainwright’s trademark eclectic style, which blends complicated arrangements and a classical flair with a modern pop sensibility.

Wainwright talked about his life today in an interview with the Blade.

The Washington Blade: Musically, how is this album different from the last two?

Rufus Wainwright: Basically, for the last two albums, I was really Napoleonic about what I wanted and about how I wanted things to sound. But, this album, due to the fact that I had some other issues to deal with unrelated to show business and because I wanted to enjoy my life, I decided to relax a little and allow other people’s ideas and took a more general approach to the process.

I think it’s more organic, but also vague. But it managed to be more enormous sounding than the last one.

Blade: Thematically, and in terms of the lyrics, what is the difference?

Wainwright: I think it’s a lot more personal. Each song is about an actual event or a person or an idea. It’s very literal, whereas “Poses” was hidden by some gauze or something. It very much focuses on a time period starting where “Poses” left off, but where there was a crash, the fall, and redemption in the end. The last album was like a mountain and this is more like a valley.

Blade: Generally, where does your inspiration for writing songs come from?

Wainwright: I basically have a disease called musical mania. Songwriting for me has always been kind of akin to a bodily function in terms of how I do it.

Since both my parents [folk singers Loudon Wainwright III and Kate McGarrigle, who plays on the new album] are songwriters and my sister [Martha Wainwright, who sings on the new album and tours with him], I think in a lot of ways it’s a form of communication within my family.

Blade: You’ve said that this album just came to you quickly. Why do you think it was so easy to write?

Wainwright: It wasn’t easy to write, it was made very quickly. I really do believe that at some point before this album some greater power said, “Focus on your own life and your basic human needs and what you need to get past this knot in the road, and don’t worry about the record at all. You take care of that, and we’ll take care of the rest.”

Blade: Has your artistic process changed at all?

Wainwright: I still had the final word in the end and working with Marius de Vries was incredible. Having a great producer like that, there was a clear chain of command. I’m pretty respected musically these days, which isn’t a great feat considering what’s out there.

Blade: How did you get respect?

Wainwright: I just practiced piano.

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