This is the 40th post in our Musician of the Day series.
Rufus Wainwright was born in 1973 and is a Canadian-American.
Rufus began playing piano at the age of 6 and at the age of 13 he began touring with The McGarrigle Sisters and Family, a folk group that consisted of Rufus, his sister, his mother and his aunt. At the age of 14 he was nominated for a Genie Award for Best Original Song for his piece I'm a-running. In 1999, he was also nominated for a Juno Award for Most Promising Male Vocalist of the Year.
He was signed to the DreamWorks label and in 1998 he released his first album Rufus Wainwright. The album received high praise by critics with Rolling Stone calling it one of the Best Albums of the Year and even naming Rufus as the Best New Artist of the year.
In 2001, he released Poses which had much the same effect as his first album. He began touring with Tori Amos, Ben Folds and Guster in order to promote the album.
It was his fifth studio album, released in 2007, that would begin to get recognition commercially. Release the Stars rose to #2 on the UK charts and to #23 on the Billboard 200.
From 2007-2008 he began writing his own Opera, Prima Donna which had it's first performance in Manchester in 2009. In 2009 he was nominated for a Grammy Award for his album Rufus Does Judy at Carnegie Hall, in which Rufus does recordings of many Judy Garland songs.
To learn more about Rufus Wainwright visit his official website.
