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One day our daughter, Viva, walked into the room and said, “Daddy, sometimes I just want to unfollow the rules.” It’s very direct, it makes complete sense, but it also sounds like unfollowing people on Facebook. The song expresses my present state, which is one of reflection, observance, and a little bit of dissection. I’m […]

Robert Wilson, the theater director, is a big figure in both my life and my husband’s life. We had worked together on a production of Shakespeare’s sonnets for the Berlin Ensemble [in 2009], so I ended up writing all of these pieces of music to Shakespeare’s words. “A Woman’s Face” came to me very quickly […]

All throughout my mother’s illness, which I knew was terminal, I had to tour quite a bit. During that time, I found it very helpful and spiritually enriching to go to churches and light candles. I’m not a religious person — I wasn’t even praying to any particular deity or saint — but I would […]

Long Island became our playground in the summers. We have a house out there, Jörn and I. Before that, I had spent a lot of time there with my mom, Kate. Sadly, she was diagnosed with a very rare form of cancer called sarcoma, and she passed away. But we did spend some amazing summers […]

“Tiergarten” is a song about Jörn [Weisbrodt], my husband, and it takes place in that beautiful park at the center of Berlin. We’ve been together now for about 15 years. I was pretty dead-set against settling down for a long time. Not so much because I didn’t want to. It just felt like an impossibility […]

I was living in New York during 9/11, and there was a moment a few months after that where there was a glimmer of hope. It looked as though the world was going to try to heal itself, and people were feeling sympathetic towards the United States, and maybe we could all learn from this […]

I wrote “Gay Messiah” initially as a joke. It was a comic ditty in the tradition of my dad’s work. This comment on sexuality and religion, with all these double entendres. I would sing it accordingly, trying to get laughs from the audience with “baptized in cum” and stuff like that. I think some of […]

My dad and I have always had a very tempestuous relationship. We love each other dearly, and we’re so influenced by each other that it’s annoying to both of us, how powerful we are in each other’s lives. We’ve done a lot of work in the meantime to clear the air and focus on our […]

I mentioned my crystal meth propensity earlier. “Go or Go Ahead” is stone-cold about that battle. I wrote it at the end of a serious comedown in San Francisco. At the end of a very dramatic and worrisome drug episode, I was able to compose a great piece of music. I don’t recommend that, and […]

I wrote a lot of Want One in somewhat of a state. I recorded it sober, but some of those songs were from that previous period. Even though I was probably pretty fucked up when I wrote it, “Oh What a World” was about my life as a whole, and something that I still struggle […]

“Poses” is where I’m facing the hard truth of my decadent behavior, realizing that I’m completely lost and somewhat in danger. It’s like I’m on a lake in the winter, and the ice is getting thinner and thinner, and I can sort of see the fish below the further I walk out towards the middle. […]

Now we’re onto my addiction. After I made my first record in L.A. and lived in Hollywood for a while, I returned to New York. I had tried to make it in Manhattan previously and failed miserably. My aesthetic was really off in terms of what was going on, which was Jeff Buckley and grunge […]

“Baby” is particularly dear to me. It’s the first incarnation of a style of music that sets me aside from everyone — whether it’s Randy Newman or David Bowie or Sufjan Stevens — which is my passion for opera. There’s a sense of drama, a sense of taking a real journey through this unpredictable world […]

For most people, “Foolish Love” is their first encounter with me, the first song on my first record. That slow opening section is very much a “Welcome to the world of Rufus.” I think it was effective in terms of capturing people’s attention. Even before the record was made, when I was signed to DreamWorks […]

“Beauty Mark” is a seminal work. Before this, I had written a song called “Liberty Cabbage,” the first-ever Rufus song — this lugubrious, unusual, romantic, Straussian melody coming out of a 16-year-old. It was about how they changed the name of sauerkraut to Liberty Cabbage during the First World War. A bit of a comment […]