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There were few straight men that pimped Rufus Wainwright quite like I once did. From the second I heard “April Fools,” the stunning first single from his Jon Brion-produced debut album, I was hooked. Yes, the voice is an acquired taste, but DAMN, man, listen to that climbing hook in the verse! And while I quite liked Want One, his 2003 meditation on drugs, desperation, 9/11 and family, I have been non-plussed by everything he’s done since then. I haven’t hated any of it, mind you, or even disliked it: I just found it, well, deathly serious. Even the concert I saw him give in the summer of 2004, an acoustic tour with Ben Folds, was a drag. We left before he was finished. I never do that. Well, almost never. It is with that thought that I’ve decided to go back and pay tribute to one of the songs that made me like him so much in the first place. “Shadows,” a song from his 2001 album Poses that was produced by onetime Propellerhead Alex Gifford, is unlike anything else in Wainwright’s catalog. Where Wainwright is normally about what will work on the theater stage, this song is all about the groove, and Gifford, as any owner of the sole Propellerheads album Decksanddrumsandrockandroll can attest, knows a thing or two about grooves. This isn’t even a fast groove; it’s just a supa smoove white boy groove. Please, Rufus, I’m begging you: take off the lederhosen, put the opera records away, and make another pop album. If you could make a song like this once, you could easily do it twice, especially since you’ve had six years to do so.
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