Everyone please congratulate the two winners for our ticket give away!

Hannah, http://www.bebo.com/schmeep, and
Dan, http://www.bebo.com/danul29

Hannah has won two tickets to the October 30th show, and Dan to the 31st show. Enjoy the concert guys, we're all envious!

When Rufus Wainwright was preparing to go to Berlin last summer to record his new album, the first he would produce himself, he envisioned it as “a kind of pared down bare bones affair.” But something dramatically different took hold once Wainwright got there, as opening track “Do I Disappoint You,” which boasts an impressive orchestral sweep to match the sturm und drang of the lyrics, amply illustrates.

“Some people go to Berlin to get more cutting edge, I went and started wearing lederhosen and going to visit baroque palaces,” Wainwright recounts with a laugh. “The Germany I was enthused with was more old fashioned and kind of romantic. I just got there, and the next thing you know, I had this huge gilded album. It was kind of an amazing experience because I didn’t intend it to be that way.”

With Release the Stars, his fifth album in a decade, Wainwright artfully establishes the intimacy he was reaching for, while creating a work even more ambitious in scope than his acclaimed 2004 release, Want Two. It’s as if he’s exchanging confidences one-on-one from the stage of New York City’s Metropolitan Opera House in the middle of, say, Aida. There is ravishing sound everywhere, yet it all serves to underscore Wainwright’s own performance as commentator, confessor, leading man. On this grand scale, his brilliant, idiosyncratic gifts as a songwriter and vocalist come into even greater focus. The emotions are heightened; his stories more vivid, dramatic, funny, real, and at times very moving. Release the Stars is as direct and personal as Wainwright initially imagined it would be.

“In retrospect I was unwise to think that my lifelong affiliation with operatic curlicues would subside once I was at the helm,” Wainwright decides. ”The record didn’t end up being a bare bones affair, but it was important that I had that image in mind. Even though I have some of the biggest moments of my career on this record, there are some of the most intimate moments too.”

Wainwright had begun to compose new material while he was touring in support of Want Two. Before leaving for Europe last year, he worked on the songs in New York City with his band. Then he went to Berlin to continue on his own. As he recalls, “I started recording ‘Do I Disappoint You’ alone on a synthesizer, just the chords and stuff, and it started sounding like Blade Runner or something, kind of sci fi. I started to wonder, what would pizzicato strings sound like right there, what about a string quartet. Then all these arrangements started tumbling out of me.”

The final track would ultimately include fourteen string and horn players, sister Martha Wainwright on backing vocals, and Pet Shop Boy Neil Tennant, who also serves as the album’s executive producer, on samples and synthesizers. Among the other notable singers and players on Release the Stars, many of them veterans of Wainwright’s previous recordings and shows, are vocalists Teddy Thompson, Jenni Muldaur, Lucy Roche and Sharon Jones (of Dap Kings fame); Richard Thompson and Beck collaborator Smokey Hormel on guitar; and violinist-guitarist-singer Joan Wasser, a/k/a Joan As Policewoman, whom Wainwright showcased as the opening act on his last tour. Longtime collaborator Marius de Vries, who produced Want One and Want Two, conducts the London Session Orchestra on several of these tracks, contributes programming, and mixed the album with Andy Bradfield.

Wainwright also invited, of all people, veteran British actress Sian Phillips, whom Masterpiece Theatre fans of a certain age will remember from her star turn in the classic I, Claudius, to add a theatrical spoken-word passage to the upbeat, love-you-through-the apocalypse “Between My Legs.” Wainwright jokingly admits, “I knew I was really in trouble when I hired Sian Phillips to speak on ‘Between My Legs.’ I became obsessed with her a few years ago when I watched I, Claudius. She was the evil empress