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Rufus and Martha Wainwright are launching a new initiative in honor of their late mother, Kate McGarrigle, to provide musicians living with aggressive cancer time in professional recording studios.

“Folk Cancer: The Kate McGarrigle Project” was inspired by the way McGarrigle — an accomplished singer-songwriter who worked closely with her sister, Anna — found comfort in music as she navigated the final months of her life before her death from cancer in 2010. The project will give musicians with cancer a similar platform to express themselves creatively during such a difficult time and...

Rufus Wainwright won’t hit age 50 until July 22, technically, but he started the festivities a few days early with “Fifty Isn’t the End,” a three-hour show at Long Island’s East End that was a tribute to Wainwright’s career, his family lineage and, inadvertently, some of the other children of famous musicians who happen to be among his pals.

With a lineup that included Jimmy Fallon, comic Tig Notaro, Laurie Anderson and members of Wainwright’s family, including his sister Martha and his father Loudon III, the show...

Loudon Wainwright III is letting me in on the realities of life at 75. “Just the other night I was moaning and groaning about my orthopaedic problems, my bad back and my hip which is probably going to be replaced,” he says, a subtle smile playing at the corners of his mouth. We’re speaking via video call from his home on Long Island. Over his left shoulder, an antique map sketches an aerial view of his surroundings in Suffolk County, the easternmost tip of New York state. “I was doing what we call the ‘organ recital’,” he says. “How many times I have to pee in the middle of the night, and all that.”

Pondering this irrefutable evidence of physical deterioration, Wainwright turned to his partner Susan Morrison, an editor at the New Yorker, and came up with some words of reassurance. “I found myself saying: ‘The good news is,...

Low and high brow keep a respectable distance in this campy, loose-bowelled adaptation of William Shakespeare’s play The Tempest. Troma Entertainment has been dumping its unique brand of independent shock cinema for almost 50 years, and for connoisseurs looking for their distinct aroma, Shakespeare’s Shitstorm does not disappoint. The uninitiated viewer may leave screenings disgusted and disgruntled. The director would have it no other way. He’s flushing his career with gusto.

This will be the last film from Troma co-founder Lloyd Kaufman, and he is really letting go. “Uncle Lloydie,” the 74-year-old low-budget filmmaking icon, is the centerpiece of the film. He wrote the script with Brandon Bassham, Gabriel Friedman, Frazer Brown, Doug Sakmann, and Zac Amico. Kaufman plays multiple roles in this tangled web of revenge and other fecal matters. As Prospero, Kaufman finds a mouthpiece instead of a codpiece, spouting undeniable truthisms in the name of pseudoscience.

Earlier this summer, Rufus Wainwright released Unfollow the Rules, his first full-on pop album since 2012’s Out of the Game, after a three-month delay due to the Covid-19 shutdown. Although he hasn’t been able to go out on the road to share his songs with fans on a tour as he typically would, that hasn’t meant he hasn’t kept busy creatively.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, he’s been performing “quarantunes” from his living room piano, what he’s termed the Rufus-Retro-Wainwright-Spective, keeping his fans entertained...

"You taught me language; and my profit on't is, I know how to curse," said Caliban once, in a mysterious land, far away. Perhaps it was New Jersey.

Inevitably one of the most talked-about films at Fantasia 2020, this is one which, though you may be watching at home, you should not attempt to watch whilst eating. When Lloyd Kaufman talks about a shitstorm, he means it literally, and this reworking of Shakespeare's finest play sees his scheming Prospero blight a ship sailing close to the shores of Tromaville through the judicious employment of whale laxative. Upgraded (not for the first time) from magician to scientist, and aided by his beautiful, blind daughter Miranda (Kate McGarrigle), he is determined to have his revenge on the Big Pharma company that sabotaged his career.

"Let it alone, thou fool; it is but trash," is a common sentiment one encounters on approaching Troma films.

Each day on Loudon Wainwright III’s front yard, squirrels attack Donald Trump. Well, not exactly: Dangling by string from a tree on his front yard on the eastern tip of Long Island is a Trump squirrel feeder, a plastic head in the shape of a certain world leader that Wainwright stuffs with peanut butter to keep critters away from his house. “It works pretty well,” he says, “but I’m not sure what state the peanut butter is in now.”

Wainwright’s perverse taste in animal bait is a...

Rufus Wainwright came by Rolling Stone’s video studio earlier this year to share the stories behind his greatest recordings in a new episode of “My Life in Songs.”

The Canadian-American singer-songwriter, whose new album, Unfollow the Rules, is out July 10th, talks candidly about early conflicts with his late mother, Kate McGarrigle (“Beauty Mark”), and his father, Loudon Wainwright III (“Dinner at Eight”); his wild twenties in downtown New York (“Cigarettes and Chocolate Milk,” “Poses”); and his life today with his husband, Jörn Weisbrodt, and daughter Viva.

Unfollow the...

Common and Rufus Wainwright are set to release new Audible Original productions, respectively titled Bluebird Memories: A Journey Through Lyrics and Life and Road Trip Elegies: Montreal to New York. Exact release dates have yet to be announced, but both projects will arrive this year.

Both projects are described as “audio-only musical narratives” and will boast a unique mix of storytelling and music. Common’s Bluebird Memories will find him exploring the various writers and musicians who have inspired him, while Road Trip Elegies finds Wainwright recreating a journey between...

Here’s a partial list of musicians we lost in the 2010s: Aretha Franklin, David Bowie, Chuck Berry, Ornette Coleman, B.B. King, Etta James, Whitney Houston, Lou Reed, Leonard Cohen, Prince, Merle Haggard, Kitty Wells, João Gilberto, Ravi Shankar, Tabu Ley Rochereau, David Mancuso, Amy Winehouse, Abbie Lincoln, Gil Scott Heron, George Jones, George Martin, George Michael, Allen Toussaint, Donna Summer, Phife Dawg, Prodigy, Adam Yauch, Heavy D, Captain Beefheart, Robert Hunter, Gregory Isaacs, Johnny Otis, Big Jay McNeely, Levon Helm, Kate McGarrigle, Guy Clark, Pete Seeger, Ralph Stanley, Gregg Allman,...

Rufus Wainwright is nearly half his life away from the start of his recording career, but at the Beacon Theatre on Tuesday night, songs from his first two full-length LPs sounded like they were written and recorded just that day.

The show was part of the Canadian singer-songwriter’s All These Poses Anniversary Tour, named for a line from 2001’s Poses. These shows are meant to celebrate the albums that not only launched Wainwright’s career but also established him as one of the great composers and lyricists of the 21st century,...