A new pose: relative stability

SITTING in a chair on the rooftop pool deck of his West Hollywood hotel, Rufus Wainwright looks like a prince enthroned above the city where he once caroused and created.

Personal landmarks surround his perch. Nearby is the Largo, the closet-size club where he frequently played while recording his 1998 debut album. Down on Melrose is the vintage furniture store owned by his friend Lorca Cohen, Leonard’s daughter, like Wainwright the offspring of singer-songwriter royalty. Farther out on Melrose is Paramount Pictures, whose famed studio gates are a central image in the title song of his new album, “Release the Stars.”

Somewhere behind him is the Chateau Marmont, where DreamWorks Records put him up when he came out from New York in the late ‘90s to start making the records that would establish him as one of pop’s most distinctive performers. And beyond are the Oakwood Apartments, where he spent a year watching reruns of “The Golden Girls” and thinking about his dead grandmother, before he met people who pulled him into the city’s social action.

“I have tons of friends who live here, and I’ve been involved in this town for many years and several scenes,” Wainwright says. “I know that whole survivor set that’s been here doing their thing for years.”

Surviving is something Wainwright appreciates. It wasn’t long ago that his taste for drugs led him to the perils of crystal meth. His addiction nearly cost him his eyesight and was accompanied by reckless sexual adventures.

He knows he’s lucky, and four years after rehab he’s a solid citizen by comparison, though he cautions that “it can switch on a dime.” He declines to say whether he’s living the sober life, but his appearance is healthy after a busy few days, playing a set at the Coachella festival and then headlining the El Rey Theatre, and all he has at lunch in advance of a flight to Berlin is a mushroom pizza.

At age 33, one of pop’s most prominent gay performers is also in a relationship for the first time in his life, with Jorn Weisbrodt, creative director of Robert Wilson’s Watermill Center on Long Island and Wilson’s manager.

Stability comes at a good time, because the New York resident has embarked on a project that he calls his “all-time fantasy and passion” -- writing an opera, a full-blown, romantic opera, in French, about a day in the life of a diva, that might even be produced by the Metropolitan Opera.

“With opera, you have to have all your artillery available,” he says. “I do not want any kind of silly slip to totally [mess] up my run at attempting something I’ve always wanted to do. You need everything to do it. Not that I’m saying you need to be sober to write an opera, but if that’s an issue that you have to grapple with, then just don’t grapple with it at that time.”

Wainwright could be a character from a romantic opera. He looks elegantly tousled, his pale skin set off by his black hair, dark shirt and jacket, and sunglasses with a double sunburst design on the earpiece. There’s a hint of aristocratic haughtiness to his manner, along with a self-deprecating charm.

“He does have a healthy belief in his own gifts, but he also has a sense of humor about himself,” says Los Angeles-based musician Kristian Hoffman, who assembled and led Wainwright’s first touring band.

“He moves on a much higher level than I do in the pantheon of rock ‘n’ roll, but every time he comes to L.A. he calls, we have dinner, he makes sure I get into the shows. The bottom line is Rufus loves family. The people I see at the dinners that are with him are the same people I saw when we were at Largo.”

Wainwright figures it will take five years to finish “Prima Donna,” which was commissioned through a Met program designed to enable playwrights and composers/librettists to create works to be staged at either the Met or Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theater.

But that isn’t his only move to branch out from conventional recording and touring.

Last year he pulled off the fairly audacious conceit of re-creating Judy Garland’s famed 1961 Carnegie Hall concert in the same theater. He repeated the show in London and Paris, and he’ll re-create Garland’s Hollywood Bowl concert when he headlines the outdoor theater on Sept. 23, the event’s 46th anniversary.

Wainwright has also done songs for the soundtracks of “Shrek,” “Moulin Rouge” and “Brokeback Mountain,” among others, and he recently wrote three songs for Disney’s animated “Meet the Robinsons.” He also composed music for New York-based choreographer Stephen Petronio.

All this diversification might reflect some creative wanderlust, but it’s also a sign of a time when pop musicians who reside at a middle level of popularity, facing limited options for exposure, are seeking new outlets.

“I’ve always wanted a bigger audience,” says Wainwright. “Due to the nature of my oeuvre, being that I have an eight-member band right now and I seem to want to hire French horn players all the time, you know, it takes a lot of money to keep this going.

“And the more kind of famous you become, the more people attach themselves to the host, and you have to pay them. It’s just a reality. You have to spread your fan base.”

With its inherent eccentricities and Wainwright’s uninhibited, yearning, ugly-duckling voice, his music isn’t destined for chart-topping mass appeal. His biggest seller was his second album, “Poses,” at 240,000. But Wainwright saw a severe drop-off on his last album, 2004’s “Want Two,” which sold just 83,000 copies in the U.S.

And while his sexual identity has made him a hero to some, he thinks it’s also cost him. “The main thing, on the books, I am the first ‘out’ gay singer in the mainstream who started their career as such,” he says. “I came out of the gates flaming, and I’ve survived and I’ve been able to do what I wanted to do.

“Yes, I’ve suffered in terms of record sales. I don’t get talked to in certain mediums and so forth, but I’m around and I’m tough and I’m gonna be around for a while.... It’s just one of the added spices of life.”

The critic’s choice

WHILE sales might come and go, his critical standing has rarely wavered, and the Met’s opera commission has added a new cachet, putting him among the company of some serious classical and theatrical creators, including Adam Guettel, Jake Heggie, Wynton Marsalis, Jeanine Tesori and Tony Kushner.

“He’s not a typical pop singer-songwriter,” says the Met’s general manager Peter Gelb, who solicited Wainwright’s participation. “He’s very passionate about opera, and he’s one of the most imaginative composers that I know....

“He has a very individualistic approach, he’s very creative, he writes beautiful lyrics and his music is original -- it’s melodic without being repetitive and sappy.... He’s a very intellectual pop artist.”

The reviews have been typically strong for his fifth studio album, “Release the Stars,” citing, as usual, his ability to find a compelling emotional voice amid the grandiosity of his richly orchestrated pop.

The album, which came out last week on Geffen Records, connects with Elton John and Brian Wilson, and there’s a folk strain that’s part of the family heritage -- his parents are the singer-songwriters Kate McGarrigle and Loudon Wainwright III -- but primarily it’s unmistakably Rufus, a genre unto itself: a sweeping form of confessional pop packed with classical, operatic, Broadway and cabaret flavors.

Though his aim when he began recording in Brooklyn was to find a simplified sound as relief from the grandeur of its predecessors, by the time he finished in Berlin he had another magnum opus -- albeit one with a difference.

“It’s in a certain way even bigger than ‘Want One’ or ‘Want Two.’ But that being said, I realized on this record that to be effective you need variety, and you need peaks and valleys. And I think on one hand this album has some of the biggest moments, but it also has some of the smallest ones of my career.”

Wainwright says he made the album in a white heat, inundated by ideas and emotions. “I’m in love, and that was a big part of it,” he says. “But then on the other hand, my mother had a very serious operation during the process. She’s doing amazingly well now ... but it was touch and go there for two seconds, and that focused me beyond belief -- uncomfortably focused me, but nonetheless did. It was very destiny-driven, this album.... It just all was meant to happen.”

His life as a musician might have been meant to happen too -- at age 13 he was touring with his mother and other members of his musical family, including his mom’s sister Anna and his sister Martha. He studied piano for 12 years and took music courses at McGill University in Montreal.

But like many trying to survive in a rapidly changing field, he’s feeling a need for footing.

“In the United States, they have this thing where if they shower you with praise at one point, then it’s almost like a weird Puritan ethic where you’ve had your quota and we’re not gonna do it anymore,” he says.

But believing that “there’s a body of work here that must be acknowledged and has been growing step by step over the years,” he’s unabashed about asking journalists and fans for support. “I do believe the work is great enough to stand up on its own and prove its point, and they’ll come to the tea party,” he says. “I have been taken a little bit for granted in the United States.... Whatever, that’s just the way it is. I’m up for the fight.”

richard.cromelin@latimes.com

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Behind the lyrics

For Rufus Wainwright, every song seems rooted in a bigger story. Here he talks about two from his new album, “Release the Stars.”

“Release the Stars,” inspired by a friend’s decision to skip his Judy Garland tribute concert:

A Judy Garland show for a gay man at Carnegie Hall is basically the wedding of the century. So my feathers were ruffled. Then last summer I was on a trip through the Alps, and all of a sudden this response to the situation erupted within me. Maybe it was the thin mountain air, but I was like, “Old Hollywood is over, it’s time for you to spread the love and for us all to be there for each other....”

But it’s more surreal than that. It’s more a vision of the gates of Paramount swinging open and Norma Desmond and Joan Crawford and everybody walking through the streets and lighting up the lives of us normal people.

“Tulsa” -- about a night on the town with the Killers’ singer Brandon Flowers:

It was at the point where that band was hitting. Brandon was being very, very nice to me because he’s a fan, and I was therefore in the coterie, and together we formed this shield of beauty and brains, and it was all in this tiny bar in Tulsa, which had never seen the likes of. It was kind of Kurt Weillian or something.

I don’t know if Brandon’s heard it yet; he might be completely horrified. But I was, once again, “Thanks a lot, thanks a lot for not sleeping with me so I can write a song about you.”