All Days Are Nights: Songs For Lulu

All Days remains deceptively complex, no matter its stream-of-consciousness flow and sparse instrumentation. Though subtle, the projected image of Wainwright sitting at a piano merely playing as his whims dictate veils a traditional melodic sensibility.

Never one to hide his emotions previously, Rufus Wainwright offers a sparse but staggeringly heartfelt collection of songs for voice and piano, influenced, at least in part, by the long-term illness and recent passing of his mother.

Intimate, intense and up close with the openly flamboyant Wainwright as he offers up himself with no full band to hide behind. It works, too.

Like a Shakespearean monologue you're either going to be living every moment with the narrator or gazing on indifferently as your attention drifts away. For those in the former camp, this is a challenging listen where life mirrors art in a profoundly resonant way.

Some fans may miss Wainwright's more complicated orchestral numbers, but a single piano is all that's needed to show off his immense vocal talent.

The song, as with most of of All Days Are Nights, is a bold, absolutely emotionally naked statement that still retains Wainwright's devastating talent for artful, universally compelling songcraft.

Dropped in with the more conventional compositions like Who Are You New York? there are wonderful arrangements of three of Shakespeare's sonnets (43, 20 and 10) all sung in Wainwright's elegiac husky timbre plus a song from his opera Prima Donna (the aria Les Feux d'Artifice T'Appellant). Gracefully, though, it all hangs together as one piece. Splendid.

All Days Are Nights is the sound of the man doing what he does best: bruised, tender, emotional and, at times, quite brilliant music.

Wainwright is definitely not an artist short on ambition, and while you occasionally wish he'd show a bit more restraint, most of the time you love him because he doesn't.

All Days Are Nights: Songs for Lulu is Wainwright's most personal album since Poses. He makes pain sound beautiful.

These songs require patience: Right when you think they'll get stronger, they lose momentum. But then, that's how grief works, too, and Wainwright lays it bare with heartbreaking simplicity here.

More fascinating than strictly enjoyable, All Days is the sound of an artist shaking his thoughts out onto paper to see what they look like and get his hands around them.

All Days Are Nights is both a housecleaning and a soulful wallow. Wainwright's voice rises from the despair with breathtaking beauty, in a friendly rivalry with his rippling piano.

It's a flabbergasting, intense album that demands intense listening. [May 2010, p.123]