In terms of songwriters, are there people working now who influence you?

I'm very influenced by my sister. We have an ongoing rapport, partly based on jealousy, partly on love. We kind of spar with songs. I'm constantly amazed at the directions she takes, and the output she has, and the wealth of ability. And it is a real shame that she's not signed.

Are there some nonmusical influences on your work?

I went to art school for a while. I'm a big pre-Raphaelite fan. I was a big Brecht-Weill fan. I love Nabokov. I love his autobiography. But I'm a real culture vulture. I'm interested in what's playing at the symphony, or what's at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

It seems you're mostly a high-culture vulture.

Yes! A culture falcon.

Have your lyrics been influenced by poetry?

Blake, Rimbaud, Baudelaire. I do consider Cole Porter and all the Tin Pan Alley or Great White Way New York songwriters to have been poets. Master poets.

When you first started singing, were you consciously trying to sound like an operatic tenor, or did your voice just develop naturally?

I wanted to be an operatic soprano. We're talking Renata Tebaldi here. I really do believe that my voice is another person or something. It's like a separate entity from my life, and one of the reasons that I've been so unsuccessful at romantic relationships is that I'm living with Maria Callas inside me, in my lungs.

A very unstable person to be living with.

Yes, very unstable and very demanding -- and on the other hand very fulfilling. I can always just sing a song and feel better afterwards.

The late Jeff Buckley is someone who, in a very different way from you, played with kind of operatic vocalizing. Do you like what he did?

I have a real story with him. When I first came to New York a long time ago when I was about 17, I had recorded my demo and I was bringing it by all these cafes, especially Sin-é, and this was when Jeff Buckley was just starting to rev up. And they refused my tape three times. So I hated Jeff Buckley. I didn't get it at all, and I thought he was an arrogant fuck, and I just didn't want to know about it. And it was a real failure, that first time I came to New York. I had to go back to Canada because I couldn't stand working at a movie theater anymore. I felt as if Jeff Buckley had defeated me in this weird way, without him even knowing it.

So then I went away and I developed my own thing, and got signed and returned to New York. And then one night I was singing a show, where the sound system had crapped out, so we were using an amp onstage, and it sounded weird coming out of the amp. And Jeff Buckley actually got up out of the audience, walked onstage and rearranged it and fixed things, and sat there curled up around my amplifier while I was singing. It was just a few months before he died, so he was not in a good state. And then we hung out later that night. It was my first lesson about measuring your ambition against other people, because he was just so weak. He was just the antithesis of what I thought he would be. I really felt bad for having had that attitude. And then he died, two months later, and I still didn't get totally into his music, I think because of trepidation. And then I had to sing "Hallelujah" for "Shrek," and I recorded my version before hearing his version, and then I heard his, and it just dawned on me at that moment the incredible loss, and the incredible talent that he was. The opportunity for me to sing with him would have been mind-blowing.

What happened to your singing between the first and second albums? It's such a different sound.

Well, I wasn't drinking as much, or doing as many drugs.

By the second album?

Oh, you mean between the debut and "Poses"? Oh man, you should hear my older tapes. My demos when I was 17? It's a wonder that I got signed. I sounded kind of like Kermit the Frog. I think what really changed my singing between those two albums was touring. I'd never toured for long periods of time. Singing every night. That was the key.

On this new album, you seem to be reaching toward higher, more vulnerable-sounding singing. In the past, you always kept such a full-throated sound going.

I think a lot of that has to do with my life. I really do feel like when I started writing this record, I was sort of subconsciously drowning, and I had to sing in a high register to pierce through the murkiness of everything. And in turn, it was kind of like self-sabotage. It made me realize that if I didn't get my act together, I wouldn't be able to perform this material, because it's really demanding. So I think in a lot of ways, my songwriting saved my life.

How consistently do you write?

I'm always writing. I've always got about four or five songs on the go, and I chip away very slowly at all of them, and then one day I'll have finished five songs.

The vast majority of your songs are written in the first person, and often seem to be based pretty firmly in often painful personal experiences. But not many people would call you a confessional songwriter.

Probably because I'm gay, therefore I can't go to confession. But a lot of the songs that I write are kind of what should be happening, what is meant to happen. If I did all of a sudden, during this conversation, stand up and sing to you -- in that context my song becomes a bit of a weapon, and a tool to get what I need. So I need to use every trick in the book to make it effective.

Most of your songs seem to be realistic, in that the events could have or did happen to you. But they're also very poetically worded.

I think a lot of it is based on visual stuff. For me the immediate lyric or vision or sensation is the most powerful and palpable in my work. I really want people to see my songs, instead of just hearing them. That's probably why my love of opera is so great. There's such an atmosphere surrounding the works, and so much visual content.

String parts and arrangements often seem really integral to your songs. Do they usually occur to you as you're composing, or are they added later in the process?

I always have a little bird on my shoulder that's singing, you know, the Berlin Philharmonic. A lot of the lines I think of previously, but a lot of that basic string padding I get someone else to do at this point. But, yeah, I do tend to think in terms of an orchestra in my head. I wish I could think like a pop band.

So you keep returning to classical references. Do you consider yourself at this point to be working at a kind of midpoint between pop and classical, or to be just a pop musician who is influenced by classical?

Well, I'm definitely airing the fact that I want to write an opera someday. Otherwise I would die an unhappy person. I don't think I would just dive headlong into a classical career. In all honesty, I don't have the chops, and I don't have the technical knowledge.

Recent Stories