I would claim that after writing his elegy for his beloved mother Kate McGarrigle, All Days Are Nights: Songs For Lulu in 2010, Rufus Wainwright lost it. Oh, not entirely, though since then he really hasn’t written anything to stop the show, anything that makes you think hey, this guy might well be the greatest songwriter of his generation.
“Poses”, “Vibrate”, “Cigarettes And Chocolate Milk”, “Dinner At Eight”… man, the man was writing songs, big, smart, important song songs, like he was Elvis Costello or something. Game charger songs.
And then he fell off a cliff, grew up, got himself devastated in mourning and wrote about it, and then the big songs stopped.
Consider “Martha” the last of a breed and also the top of a rare breed. Songs written as Kate lay in hospital dying of cancer, they sounded like stories ripped right out of his life, like a diary page but more than that: “Martha”, his sister, is a telephone conversation, or rather he has reached her answering machine and he is obviously just back from visiting his mother, and he is telling her that it is time now to stop everything because it is over, childhood is over, pettiness is over, this is deadly serious. This is operatic tragedy, this song is tragic, Kate’s impending death is tragic, and Rufus is tragic. He is a tragic man, deep in mourning, deeply unable to say what it would take to make things worse. Maybe nothing can. Maybe even death won’t be as terrible as this warning. In an interview with Elvis Costello he expressed his deep love for his mom by saying it is a damn good thing he was gay because he loved her so much.
Martha, it’s your brother calling
Time to go up north and see mother
Things are harder for her now
And neither of us is really that much older than each other
Anymore
Martha, it’s your brother calling
Have you had a chance to see father?
Wondering how’s he doing and
There’s not much time for us to really be that angry at each other
Anymore
It’s your brother calling, Martha
It’s your brother calling, Martha
Please call me back
I know how it goes
You gotta ring your little finger
Hit the tree and see what falls
And make the sun come out on Sunday afternoon
All the while you heat the plates
And serve a little wine
And wear a hat and make ’em laugh
And forget that there is nobody in the room
Anymore
It’s your brother calling, Martha
Its your brother calling, Martha
Please call me back
This is the truest song you will hear about how death effects the living, it is so mournful it hurts to listen to it. When I saw him perform the album at Carnegie Hall (here), it sounded like words left unsaid. Today it feels like the deepest recesses of untimely grief. His greatest and most human song.
