House of Rufus
| House of Rufus | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
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| Box set by Rufus Wainwright | ||||
| Released | July 18, 2011 | |||
| Recorded | 1995–2011 | |||
| Genre | Baroque pop | |||
| Language | English | |||
| Label | Decca, DreamWorks, Geffen | |||
| Producer | Jon Brion, Nick de Grunwald, Marius de Vries, Alex Gifford, Ethan Johns, Bradley Kaplan, Damian LeGassick, Pierre Marchand, Paula Quijano, Phil Ramone, George Scott, Martin R. Smith, Barry Taylor, Rufus Wainwright, Greg Wells | |||
| Rufus Wainwright chronology | ||||
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| Professional ratings | |
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| Review scores | |
| Source | Rating |
| BBC Music | Positive |
| The Daily Telegraph |   |
| Evening Standard | |
| The Irish Times | |
House of Rufus is a collection of six studio albums, two live albums (one being a double album), four additional albums of previously unreleased material, and six DVDs recorded by Canadian-American singer-songwriter Rufus Wainwright, reissued as a 19-disc box set in the United Kingdom on July 18, 2011. Wainwright's official site claimed that the collection "spans Rufus' entire career and represents the most complete collection of Rufus Wainwright recordings to date."
The box set's title commemorates his five-night residency of the same name at London's Royal Opera House during July 18–23, 2011. Only 3,000 copies were produced for worldwide distribution. The collection contains "hard-to-find" tracks and is encased in a red velvet-covered book. While some reviewers questioned the need for such an extensive collection, critical reception of the box set was mostly positive.
The box set's release was confirmed on Wainwright's official site on March 21, 2011. Only 3,000 copies were produced for worldwide distribution. Box sets were sold for £150 in the United Kingdom, €170 throughout Europe, and were available as imports in the United States for $350. As part of the marketing strategy to promote the collection and concert series, Universal Music Catalogue developed a "treasure hunt" video for YouTube where visitors identified clues, and navigated links within a collage of Wainwright's music videos. According to Wainwright, the rarities box set was a "little Rufus blast" before he began work on his next pop album. Wainwright also said the following of the collection: "There's my old demos, a lot of them were recorded in Montreal... when I had a very, very different voice, I kind of sounded like a little old man. There's that and there's a lot of fabulous collaborations with my mother, my father and some other great artists." Wainwright had originally intended to call the box set The Rufus Cycle. After being told the title was "too sophisticated", he went with House of Rufus, partly inspired by Lady Gaga's Haus of Gaga. Wainwright claimed the box set's release shortly after his father's (Loudon Wainwright III) box set 40 Odd Years was "totally serendipitous".
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