Rufus Wainwright: Rufus Retro-Wainwright-Spective live stream review – perfectly at home

Stuffed brown bear, Persian rug, book about Maria Callas rammed on to a tight shelf – the venue is most definitely Rufus Wainwright’s Los Angeles home. Wainwright is on acoustic guitar, softly crooning Not Ready to Love, a song from his 2007 album Release the Stars. His vibrato – far oakier now than when the song was written – coils itself sonorously around a handful of loaded words: “beast”, “surrender”, “murderer”.

The camera shot is, necessarily, tight – though not as cosy as it was during lockdown last spring, when the singer-songwriter and part-time opera composer sang daily in his Japanese dressing gown straight to cameraphone. These Robe Recitals began in late 2019 but came into their own during lockdown; Wainwright reprised them last December during another LA lockdown.

By contrast, this evening’s Retro-Wainwright-Spective show is almost Broadway in its elevated production values. Not only is Wainwright fully clothed, but his setup now includes two masked band members – Brian Green on keening electric guitar and Jacob Mann on piano and keyboard – and not just one, but two camera angles. Jörn Weisbrodt, Wainwright’s husband and manager, potters around off-camera, home-schooling their daughter, Viva, warning that a tutor might ring the doorbell soon.

Routinely unguarded throughout his career, Wainwright has never been an artist particularly hung up on inscrutability. He’s gossiped about famous friends between songs; told audiences about coming out, of the difficulties growing up between his mother, the late singer-songwriter Kate McGarrigle, and his father, Loudon Wainwright III. Tonight he reminisces suggestively about how a white suit worn by Brandon Flowers inspired the song Tulsa (“somehow it didn’t get dirty, sadly”), and how director Baz Luhrmann didn’t use his song, Leaving for Paris No 2, in his movie Moulin Rouge.

However revelatory the main action, the casual intimacy of this live stream provides its own little thrills. The bookshelves are just out of focus, making further investigation both tortuous and irresistible. Viva is, of course, also the daughter of Lorca Cohen, and granddaughter of the late Leonard. Even if Wainwright had wanted to be enigmatic, being born into a clan of folk singers, one knitted into other clans of folk singers, makes a “stealth mode” Rufus hard to imagine.

Current strictures have ramped up his expository tendency. Really, Wainwright should now be touring his lovely, Grammy-nominated 2020 album Unfollow the Rules. With the present on hold, he’s working his way through his past with a kind of pincer movement. These chronological half-album-by-half-album gigs have been going out on Fridays since last October, stripping down Wainwright’s lavish arrangements to permutations of piano, keys and guitar. The most recent gigs remain available to stream on demand; there are more scheduled until late March.

At the tail end of last year came an illuminating three-part aural autobiography, Road Trip Elegies. In this “trifecta of music, motion and analysis”, Wainwright set off by car from Saint-Sauveur, Quebec, where the McGarrigle family seat still stands and where Kate, a decade gone, is buried. The endpoint is New York, where Wainwright’s father, still nearby, used to live. As well as shuttling physically and psychologically between parents, the trip is symbolic of going from youth to adulthood, small town to fame; you can often hear the turn indicator. Amazingly, Wainwright’s passenger is his shrink – and little is off limits, from McGarrigle finding the teenage Wainwright’s stash of gay porn to how the young Wainwright found succour on the unsung side of the family.

Perhaps a future road trip will take in how Wainwright moved to LA, where the Cohen clan have long clustered, and where Wainwright’s beloved Hollywood sits, not far from his Laurel Canyon redoubt.

Unlike on Road Trip Elegies, there is little deep inner delving during this gossipy gig. We find Wainwright halfway through Release the Stars, an album that sits roughly halfway through his discography. Although there is no such thing as a sub-par Rufus Wainwright album, Release the Stars is definitely a keeper, dating from the time when he was recovering from a period of self-destructive excess. He’s just met Weisbrodt, and on the title track he’s taking old Hollywood – and possibly the current entertainment industry – to task for keeping actors in the closet. Release the Stars peaks and peaks, with Wainwright waving his hand about, transported. “Of course I am speaking in metaphors!” he seethes, keen for everything to be out in the open.

• A Rufus Retro-Wainwright-Spective: Release the Stars Part 2 is available on demand until 28 February

• Road Trip Elegies: Montreal to New York are available on the US Audible site only