Artist · chart history · #182 in indie & aaa artist polls
Rufus Wainwright
Solo artist Rhinebeck Canadian‐American singer‐songwriter and composer
Rufus Wainwright is an artist from Rhinebeck. Rufus Wainwright has 48 chart appearances on 27 radio countdowns from 8 stations on RockLists, spanning 1999–2026. The most successful song on radio countdowns is “Hallelujah”, which appears on 10 lists with a best position of #166. The station that charted Rufus Wainwright most often is WYEP (Pittsburgh, PA), with 21 appearances. The artist’s biggest year on year-end countdowns was 2012.
Rufus Wainwright came into the world in 1973 with a songbook already in the family: his parents were the musicians Loudon Wainwright III and Kate McGarrigle, and his younger sister Martha sings too. He took the inheritance somewhere grander. His self-titled debut arrived on DreamWorks in May 1998, all piano, velvet and melodrama, the work of a young man who plainly preferred opera houses to garages. "April Fools" was the song that let rock radio in on the secret.
Poses followed in June 2001, and "Cigarettes and Chocolate Milk" set the tone: woozy, decadent and gorgeous. Then he went bigger still. Want One and Want Two, released a year apart, were later packaged together as the double album Want, and in 2007 came Release the Stars, with "Going to a Town", plus Rufus Does Judy at Carnegie Hall, his first live album. Out of the Game followed in 2012.
He never stayed inside pop's lines. He has written two classical operas, turned Shakespeare's sonnets into songs for a stage work by Robert Wilson, and in 2008 he received GLAAD's Stephen F. Kolzak Award. Eleven studio albums in, he remains a crooner with a composer's ambitions.
Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.
Songs by Rufus Wainwright on radio countdowns
| # | Song | Strength | Lists | Best | #1s | Peak year |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Hallelujah | 10 | #166 | – | – | |
| 2 | Cigarettes and Chocolate Milk | 10 | #56 | – | – | |
| 3 | Out Of The Game | 8 | #29 | – | 2012 | |
| 4 | Poses | 2 | #191 | – | – | |
| 5 | I Don't Know What It Is | 2 | #424 | – | – | |
| 6 | California | 2 | #385 | – | – | |
| 7 | April Fools | 2 | #34 | – | 1999 | |
| 8 | Going To A Town | 4 | #79 | – | 2007 | |
| 9 | Across The Universe | 1 | #251 | – | – | |
| 10 | Beautiful Child | 1 | #286 | – | – | |
| 11 | One Man Guy | 1 | #516 | – | – | |
| 12 | Memphis Skyline | 1 | #512 | – | – | |
| 13 | 14th Street | 1 | #815 | – | – | |
| 14 | Grey Gardens | 1 | #732 | – | – | |
| 15 | Jericho | 1 | #1085 | – | – |
Albums with charting songs
Where each song was first released, from MusicBrainz.
Year-end chart timeline
Combined year-end countdown points per year. Taller bars mean more songs placing higher across more stations.
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