Rufus pushes himself higher

"I want to establish myself as a premier vocalist," says the 33-year-old New Yorker. To this end, he releases a new album on 14 May that pushes his distinctive voice right to the forefront of a huge musical palette of hushed piano balladry, country pop and vast orchestral swells.

Release the Stars (Universal) was supposed to be his "pared down" album, but the boy, looking dapper as ever sipping English tea in a corner of the Claridge's Bar, can't help himself. "I was unable to rein myself in. Life and circumstances were too dramatic," he tells me.

While he was writing the songs, his mother, folk singer Kate McGarrigle, was diagnosed with cancer, and though he stresses "she's fine, she's fine", and no songs are directly about the situation, it definitely coloured the emotion of the music.

" The minute something affects someone you love, it's so much more of an intense, ferocious experience that it dwarfs anything else in your own life. The songs came to me much faster than usual. Time became the enemy."

Despite the pain behind the music, this fifth album is more approachable than anything he has done before, finally featuring songs strong enough to stand up to the ambitious production underpinning them. Wainwright has already confirmed his status as a live draw in London, with five sold-out nights at the Old Vic theatre starting on 27 May. Soon he could achieve the record sales to match.

Yet his success was a long time coming. In his early career he had to ward off the natural suspicion that surrounds the children of famous parents (his father is singer Loudon Wainwright III) and recover from severe drug addictions.

Now clean, he climbed a pedestal of his own last June when he re-enacted Judy Garland's legendary 1961 Carnegie Hall concert on the same stage, one of the most vocally taxing exercises he could have conceived. He repeated the trick in Paris and twice at London's Palladium in February.

His tongue is not noticeably in his cheek when he asserts: "I don't think there's any other pop artist or even jazz artist who could have done it."

Tirelessly expanding his horizons, now he has found an outlet for his classical inclinations. A life-long opera buf f, he describes spending all his money on tickets to New York's Metropolitan Opera as a precocious 13-year-old. Recently the Met's general manager, Peter Gelb, commissioned an opera from Wainwright as part of a programme for young artists. The singer has conceived "The day in the life of a diva", a fourcharacter opera about an opera singer inspired by Maria Callas and Régine Crespin.

In a rare show of modesty, Wainwright accepts that he has "an infantile state of musical knowledge in the opera world. I'm not going to do the history of Rome or anything." But whatever his flaws, he's never been lacking in ambition. Seeing that towering self-belief up close, I'm convinced the classical world will be the next to fall for the charms of this unstoppable star.

AN EARLY LISTEN TO...
The White Stripes
Icky Thump (XL)
Prolific they may be, but a new White Stripes album is still a very big deal. Even so, I was surprised by the sight of two employees of the Detroit duo's west London record company, XL, sprinting breathlessly down the street after me, in the mistaken belief that I had wandered off with a copy of Icky Thump, which is released on 18 June.

Not that I wouldn't have liked to go on the lam with yet another classic from Jack and Meg White, 13 tracks which show off some of Jack's most ferocious guitar work to date and add a whole new set of eccentricities. Londoners will be pleased to see the pair dressed as a pearly king and queen on the sleeve, and northerners may be amused by the deliberately misspelled title, but it's really the Scots who should be swelling with pride.

Prickly Thorn, But Sweetly Worn is a patriotic song about thistles, all mandolins and folksy li-deliing. St Andrew (This Battle is in the Air) is a strong candidate for the weirdest thing White Stripes have ever done, a psychedelic interlude with a speeded-up spoken word sequence from Meg. Both tracks prominently feature bagpipes. Almost as bizarre is Conquest, a cover by forgotten Fifties songwriter Corky Robbins, which invents a new genre that might be known as mariachi metal. Then there's Rag and Bone, an exhilarating series of racing bluesy riffs over which Jack and Meg act as comedy scavengers, asking, "Anybody got a Christmas tree? Can you part with a toilet seat?"

It's all good fun, but the songs that fans will keep returning to are the more familiar, bare-bones guitar workouts, many of which are stunning. Both the title track and I'm Slowly Turning Into You feature unique guitar solos that sound almost electronic, and elsewhere there are both acoustic and slide masterclasses that prove that, however peculiar his idiosyncrasies, Jack White still knows his way around his instrument better than anyone.

NEW ON THE NET
CRACK open the Courvoisier, the R&B album of the year is about to arrive. Amerie, the voice behind extraordinary 2005 hit 1 Thing, returns with her third LP, Because I Love It, in mid-May. The first taste is in download stores on Monday in the shape of a funky blast called Take Control.

Also set for a big year is London-based American Ross Copperman, who already scored an iTunes number one with his first single, and looks like repeating the trick next week with All She Wrote. It's a hummable, middle-oftheroad thing that should appeal to the hordes who won't stop buying that Fray single.

Dame Shirley Bassey will find out if the charts still have room for her at 70 when her first single in a decade is released, prior to her following in Rolf Harris's footsteps as this year's least likely Glastonbury performer. The Living Tree is out on Monday, and what do you know? It sounds like a Bond theme.