Want Two contains a lot of ambitious and emotional music: album opener ‘Agnus Dei’ is a string-drenched, hyper-passionate Catholic hymn performed in Latin; closer ‘Old Whore’s Diet’ is a 9-minute epic alternating between a capella crooning and Mediterranean dance beats; ‘Little Sister’ is a baroque treat that, stripped of its vocals, would sound like it was written in the early 18th century.
But the song I love the most of all is the simplest tune on the album — the acoustic stroll of ‘Gay Messiah.’
Want Two came out a year after Want One, and the main distinction I’d draw between the two albums is that this one takes a more feminine perspective while the first was more masculine.
Another of the Want One tunes that immediately grabbed me and refused to let go, ‘Beautiful Child’ is a hurricane of a song with so much going on at once that it threatens to spin off into oblivion almost every second it’s on. But somehow it tiptoes on that edge and manages to never fall off.
It’s appropriate that chance has put me in a position to choose as my 300th Song of the Day a tune I consider one of my very favorites ever.
Three years later, in 2001, Wainwright released his second album, Poses. I remember buying the CD during a trip to San Francisco and listening to it for the first time on headphones in our hotel room. An unaccompanied man buying a Rufus Wainwright album in San Francisco — that’s probably the most conspicuously gay thing I’ve done apart from watching Brokeback Mountain alone in Coconut Grove. And sleeping with that guy that time…
Meet Me In Montauk 