Description
Rufus Wainwright is, at heart, a performer. It’s as easy to imagine the king of 2000s baroque pop on a Broadway stage as it is to picture him plucking at an old guitar on a creaky New England porch. In Folkocracy, his eleventh studio album, Wainwright marries those two versions of himself using a mix-’n’-match variety of folk songs with the help of a bevy of family, friends and fellow musicians. The collaborations range from off-kilter takes on 19th-century sea shanties to bright, triumphant celebrations of Neil Young and The Mamas and the Papas.
The work is Wainwright’s 50th birthday gift to himself, and it reads as such. It’s the pure definition of a “passion project,” Folkocracy is, for the most part, soft and sweet—a tribute album to his complicated upbringing.
His take on Neil Young’s “Harvest,” one of the album’s lead singles, is worth a listen even for the less folksy among us. There is a joyful reverberation to this collaborative effort—Andrew Bird, Chris Stills and Wainwright all sound like they want to be doing this together, and Bird’s violin is undoubtedly a highlight of “Harvest” and of the album’s instrumentals as a whole.
