'Want Two' is the follow up to the 2003 release 'Want One' and completes Wainwright's original idea of recording a double album. A combination of mini-operettas, chamber pop, and classical work, the album's lyrical content draws on Wainwright's experience of relationships, drug abuse, and lifestyle.

Feb 2005

The long wait for 'Want Two' by Rufus Wainwright is finally over. Hailed as "The Chosen One" by the press, this unique and immense songwriting talent returns with more beautifully articulated orchestral-laced emotional pop musings of love and faith.

• Q - 4 (out of 5) - "A brave, bold record that deserves attention."
  NME - "One of the only living songwriting geniuses."
  Time Out - "The prince of emotive pop."
• Uncut - "...a shadowy, provocative and thoughtful sequel..."
  NME - "...enough raw-edged emotion and stupendous songwriting to enchant all"

U.K. issue features two live bonus tracks.
Rufus Wainwright is a red-blooded romantic in a lineage that includes such diverse bards as poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, Broadway songwriter Cole Porter, and singer/songwriter Nick Drake. A conveyor of love's petulant mood swings, Wainwright explores the mechanics of need and sorrow, allowing gorgeous melodies--and a wry sense of humor--to soothe, if not cure, his tragic tendencies.
WANT TWO (the sequel to 2003's more subdued WANT ONE) opens with a haunting take on the Agnes Dei (here titled "Agnus Dei"), replete with guitar noise, orchestral accompaniment, and Cimbalom drone. This traditional Catholic prayer, a plea for mercy and peace, has never sounded so desperate, so dark, and yet, by track's end, so sweet and redemptive. The rest of the album expands on this lyrical theme of pleading and, melodically, echoes medieval church music, even as it flirts with a variety of rhythmic styles. "The Art Teacher" recalls a vintage Philip Glass piece, with its mesmerizing, repetitive block chords topped by a mournful, windblown melody, while the very pretty and hilarious "Gay Messiah" could be a Billy Joel Top 40 hit in a parallel universe. Though the conflict between desire and peace never quite resolves here, WANT TWO captures the beauty and excitement of the struggle, as told by an artist at the top of his game. (Note: A DVD of Wainwright performing in concert is included with the CD.)

Although Rufus Wainwright is the son of singer-songwriters Loudon Wainwright and Kate McGarrigle, since the 1990s he has firmly established his own musical presence. Though he's an introspective troubadour, he looks back beyond the folk and rock influences of his parents to the golden age of pop songwriting  la Cole Porter and the Gershwins. His keening, diva-manqu vocals and elegantly melodic compositions are as far from "rock" as any pop-based music can be. If he has any antecedents in the pop world, they would be similarly quirky L.A. songwriters of a previous era such as Van Dyke Parks (who co-produced Wainwright's debut album) and Randy Newman. His open homosexuality has endeared him to many in the gay community.