Rufus Wainwright: I’m a Stranger Here Myself

I'm a Stranger Here Myself—Wainwright Does Weill (Thirty Tigers, 2025) is a project decades in the making. Rufus Wainwright's affection for the music of Kurt Weill dates back to his twenties, though the idea of an album began to take shape more recently, following a series of concerts at the storied Café Carlyle in 2023. From those intimate performances, the project has blossomed into the lush orchestral form heard on this album—one of the artistic high points of 2025.

Few singers possess the grandeur and sensitivity required to inhabit a song as fully as Wainwright; fewer still are better suited to do justice—across multiple languages—to Weill's repertoire. Add the lush textures of the Pacific Jazz Orchestra, or the Metropole Orkest, and what emerges is nothing less than an album for the ages.

If the record underscores the enduring relevance of Weill's oeuvre, its title track—first heard in the 1943 Broadway musical One Touch of Venus—offers a particularly vivid illustration. It draws our attention to a time when popular songwriting could be both sophisticated and accessible, never underestimating the intelligence of an audience. Listen closely to the elegance of its language and imagery as it captures the self-doubting and anguish of unrequited love. The lyricist behind the musical—from which "Speak Low" would emerge as its most enduring standard—was a poet, Ogden Nash, a reminder that refinement, wit, and emotional clarity once went hand-in-hand in popular song—raising, in turn, a more searching question: what does the state of today's popular music—with its rudimentary lyrics, trivial imagery, and impoverished thematic depth—say about the broader cultural, intellectual and sentimental trajectory of our species?