Music Memoirs

A friend of mine runs a blog filled with delightful music memes, and I’ve decided to weigh in on this week’s topic.

Top 5 facts about one of your favorite artists.

While he hasn’t made an appearance on the blog yet, one of my all-time favorite artists is Rufus Wainwright, who has all sorts of ridiculous-yet-intriguing facts floating out there about him.  I sort of feel like Rufus is at times so absurd and bigger-than-life that he needs a set of Chuck Norris-esque facts about him.  I don’t know what these facts would be, because I’m not that witty, but if you come up with something, by all means, let me know.  It would be lolarious.

1. The day before he was born (or thereabouts), his mother Kate purchased a ham… that happened to weigh the same as Rufus did upon birth.  (Later recounting the story, Rufus says that before his sister Martha’s birth, Kate saw a spectactular vision of a rainbow.   He, meanwhile, ended up associated with ham.)
2. The ridiculously large, diamond encrusted ring Rufus typically wears was given to him by his BFF Elton John (who was the one to push Rufus into entering rehab at the height of his drug addiction).
3. One of his good friends during childhood was Hole/Smashing Pumpkins bassist Melissa Auf Der Mar.  She appeared in an early music video for Rufus (April Fools, which also has an appearance by Gwen Stefani) and, memorably, a rather provocative (and pretty obviously drug-fuelled) photoshoot with Rufus for Nerve magazine.
4. Rufus has said that if he wasn’t a musician, he probably would have been an artist (and did, in fact, take a lot of art classes during his failed attempts at college).  I’m not quite convinced that this would have been a good path.
5. Apparently, Rufus’ ultimate coming out to his mother involved having an awesome day together running around in Paris (I think), where Kate said some sort of typically mom-ly thing about how much she loved him, prompting Rufus to reply with something along the lines of, “But mother, you could never love me because you said you would never love me if I was gay.”  (The full quote/story is in a Vanity Fair article from a few years ago; go read it, because the article is just amazing.)  Leave it to Rufus to be that dramatic, yeah?