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RUFUS WAINWRIGHT Out Of The Game lyrics

Out of the Game is the seventh studio album by singer-songwriter Rufus Wainwright, released in Australia, the United Kingdom and Canada on April 20, 2012 and in the United States in May 2012 through Decca Records/Polydor Records. The album was produced by Mark Ronson. Recording sessions began in May 2011. Recording and mixing took place at Dunham Sound in Brooklyn and Sear Sound in Manhattan. Wainwright claimed that Out of the Game contained the "poppiest", most "danceable" music in his repertoire to date and was influenced by the birth of his daughter and the death of his mother, Kate McGarrigle. Musical influences included David Bowie, Elton John and Queen.
Guest musicians include his sister Martha Wainwright, Thomas "Doveman" Bartlett, drummer Andy Burrows, guitarist Nels Cline, members of the Dap-Kings, Sean Lennon, the alternative rock band Wilco, Miike Snow's Andrew Wyatt and Yeah Yeah Yeahs guitarist Nick Zinner.
If the aim of singer-songwriter Rufus Wainwright's collaboration with super-producer Mark Ronson is to bring mainstream popular success to one of contemporary music's most exuberantly gifted eccentrics, Out of the Game must be judged a brilliant failure. It is a lush, giddy, intricate, multifarious concoction of swooning melodies, wry lyrics, louche manners and ornate arrangements, self-involved to the point of narcissism and dressed up in the plush colours of Seventies pop-rock.

The songwriter himself has described it as his most ?danceable? collection but, as Wainwright makes explicit in the title track, the former hedonist's idea of a good night out has tempered with age and fatherhood. This is more Guilty Pleasures than techno Heaven. Wainwright's florid take on commercialism brings to mind a camp and clever young Billy Joel backed by 10cc, and it's a long time since anyone has considered either of those to be chart music. Wainwright's devoted fans will find much to celebrate but, in terms of elevating him from the margins, I don't think he's going to be causing Rihanna any sleepless nights.

In the manner of jurors declaring interest, I should (like most UK critics) confess a minor conflict. There is a song about one of the UK's leading music PRs, Barbara Charone. It's a smoochy, dreamy ballad with a middle-of-the-road soul groove replete with Bacharach style heavenly choirs trilling ?Barbara?. I confess it odd to hear such tender rhapsodising of a woman I associate with hectoring me in a growly voice to review her artists.

It shouldn't matter to anyone else but it is symptomatic of the problem with Wainwright's oeuvre, given to particularity rather than generality. Montauk is a synth-burbling swirl in which Wainwright extends a welcome to his baby daughter (Viva, whose mother is Lorca Cohen, daughter of Leonard) to the house he shares in Montauk, New York, with her ?other dad?, arts administrator Jorn Weisbrodt, himself the subject of the sweet but overstretched Song of You.
by Neil McCormick, The Telegraph