Rufus Wainwright's French-language EP trades orchestral excess for sparse arrangements that expose genuine emotional vulnerability. Recorded with producer Pierre Marchand, the five songs—three originals and two standards—represent his finest work, letting his distinctive voice anchor intimate late-night meditations rather than theatrical spectacle. Essential for anyone who thought they'd heard what Wainwright could do.
There is a version of Vu that exists only late at night, when the house is quiet and the wine glass is nearly empty, and that is the only version worth knowing.
Rufus Wainwright had already shown he could do grand things — Want Two arrived in 2004 draped in orchestral excess, emotionally exhausting in the best sense. Release the Stars, the album that preceded Vu by a few months in 2007, was his imperial phase in full bloom, forty-piece arrangements and gay-liberation theatrics and Antony Hegarty floating through the room like a beautiful ghost. Then Vu arrived almost as an afterthought, a French-language EP quietly slipped into the world that same year.
It is, quietly, the best thing he has ever recorded.
What the French Does
The title is a play on déjà vu, and the EP leans into that sense of something half-remembered. Wainwright sings five songs in French — three originals and two classics — and the language does something to his voice that English rarely permits. The camp is still present but the armor comes off. He sounds less like a performer and more like someone who wandered into a late Parisian session and stayed too long.
The originals include “Complainte de la butte,” which he had already recorded for the Moulin Rouge! soundtrack, recast here with more care. His takes on Édith Piaf’s “La complainte de la Seine” and the Charles Trenet standard “La mer” are not impersonation — they are Wainwright genuinely inside the songs, which is a different and rarer thing.
The production is spare by his standards. Pierre Marchand, the Montreal producer best known for his long collaboration with Sarah McLachlan, handled the sessions. Marchand’s instinct here was to pull back — less orchestration than a Wainwright record has any right to contain, more space for the voice to land in. The piano is close-miked and dry. The strings arrive like weather, not architecture.
The Session
Recording took place in Montreal, which made sense. Quebec gave the project a local legitimacy that London or New York wouldn’t have, and Wainwright’s family roots there — his mother Kate McGarrigle, his aunts, the entire McGarrigle dynasty — meant the French sat naturally in his mouth. Kate McGarrigle played on the record. She died of cancer in January 2010, and knowing that now gives certain moments on Vu a weight they didn’t have on first listen.
There is something about hearing a mother and son work through chanson together, unselfconsciously, on a record this small.
The string arrangements were handled with remarkable economy. Nothing overstays its welcome. In a catalog that can sometimes mistake maximalism for emotion, Vu proves Wainwright always had the restraint — he just rarely chose to use it.
Why This One
I came back to this EP recently after years away from it. I put it on while cleaning up after dinner and just stopped moving somewhere around “La mer.”
That is the test, I think. Not whether it holds up analytically, not whether it fits neatly into any critical narrative about the artist’s development. Whether it stops you cold when you weren’t expecting it to.
Vu stops you cold.
It is twenty-three minutes long. It asks nothing of you except that you sit with it. In a year when Wainwright released a full album of enormous ambition, this slight and almost private thing is what I keep returning to, the way you return to a photograph you almost forgot was in the box.