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All Days Are Nights: Songs for Lulu

All Days Are Nights: Songs for Lulu
Rufus Wainwright All Days Are Nights.jpg
Studio album by Rufus Wainwright
Released March 23, 2010 (2010-03-23)
Recorded December 2009
Genre Pop
Length 47:48
Label Decca (U.S.), Polydor (U.K.)
Producer Rufus Wainwright, Pierre Marchand
Rufus Wainwright chronology
Milwaukee at Last!!!
(2009)Milwaukee at Last!!!2009
All Days Are Nights: Songs for Lulu
(2010)
House of Rufus
(2011)House of Rufus2011
Singles from All Days Are Nights: Songs for Lulu
  1. "Who Are You New York?"
    Released: March 2, 2010 (Canada)
Professional ratings
Aggregate scores
Source Rating
Metacritic 72
Review scores
Source Rating
Allmusic 4/5 stars
The A.V. Club A−
Drowned in Sound (7/10)
Entertainment Weekly B
The Guardian 4/5 stars
Pitchfork Media (3.9/10)
PopMatters (6/10)
Rolling Stone 3.5/5 stars
Slant Magazine 3.5/5 stars
The Times 3/5 stars

All Days Are Nights: Songs for Lulu is the sixth studio album by Canadian-American singer-songwriter Rufus Wainwright, first released in Canada through Decca Records on March 23, 2010. The album was produced by Wainwright (with Pierre Marchand on three tracks), and mixed by Marchand, who produced Wainwright's second album, Poses (2001).

All Days Are Nights is Wainwright's first release since the death of his mother, folk singer Kate McGarrigle, who died from cancer in January 2010. While Wainwright is known for lush orchestrations and arrangements, this album contains piano and voice work, with twelve original songs. Three songs are settings of William Shakespeare's sonnets ("Sonnet 10", "Sonnet 20", and "Sonnet 43").

Following larger projects such as his tribute concert series to Judy Garland and subsequent album release, Release the Stars, and annual Christmas shows billed as the "McGarrigle Christmas Hour", Wainwright intended for his next studio release to be a simpler piano and voice album.

The first part of the title, "All Days Are Nights", comes from the final couplet of William Shakespeare's "Sonnet 43" ("All days are nights to see till I see thee..."). When asked about the reference to "Lulu", which appears in the second part of the album's title, Wainwright stated in a November 2009 interview that Lulu is a "dark, brooding, dangerous woman that lives within all of us", similar to the Dark Lady character in Shakespeare's sonnets. Wainwright claimed that his Lulu was Louise Brooks in the 1929 movie Pandora's Box. He also stated in an interview with Jian Ghomeshi that Lulu is a reference to the opera of the same name by Alban Berg, which was adapted from Frank Wedekind's plays Earth Spirit (or Erdgeist, 1895) and Pandora's Box (or Die Büchse der Pandora, 1904), the latter of which inspired the aforementioned film by Georg Wilhelm Pabst.


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Wikipedia

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