The Art Teacher

The Art Teacher (ISWC T-072.113.409-3) is a piano ballad written and composed by American/Canadian singer-songwriter Rufus Wainwright, originally appearing on his 2004 EP Waiting for a Want and later that same year on his album Want Two as well as "best of" compilation and live albums released in 2014. This version is a live recording made at Le Metropolis in Montreal, and described by The Guardian as "unadorned — you can hear Wainwright gasping for breath between each line" (which is true, and in my view adds a considered quality to the performance that enhances the song's message). Other versions are from different performances, including one recorded at the Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco, California.

Wainwright explains this song's origin:

It's a song about a guy I met at the gym who of course was straight. He'd tell me stories about his female students who were ravenous for him. So I put myself in their shoes to write the song. I played it for him and it went totally over his head!

Lyrically, the song is about a middle-aged woman recalling her unrequited first love, an intense crush on her school's art teacher who was "not that much older than I was". Some critics have interpreted the song to be an exploration of Wainwright's sexuality, written as a gay man from the perspective of a straight girl. As he usually sings songs in the first person, I think his choosing this gendered perspective was very deliberate and clever, as it makes the theme more relatable to straight people, and given that it's sung by a gay man, it offers some insight into just how much heterosexual and homosexual attraction are the same for the individual. Just as intense, just as life-changing, just as valid. The emotions expressed are universally human, and the context helps break down dehumanizing stereotypes. It also evokes nostalgia of adolescence which is a dopamine hit for anyone. Often performed live, a 2016 concert reviewer at Bristol's Colston Hall commented about Wainwright's powerful storytelling, describing the song as "one of the saddest stories committed to music. His rendition convinced you that he was the female protagonist, not just playing a part but inhabiting her psyche."

Musically, the song has drawn comparisons to the compositional style of Philip Glass, with a melancholic chord structure and note sequences that alternate in a fairly rapid rhythm. (Sorry, it's hard to describe Glass - his work is very distinctive and very stylistically consistent. Go watch Koyaanisqatsi (1982) and you will understand.) This permits Wainwright to easily construct a varying lyrical cadence on top of a steady and hypnotic musical cadence, and enables him to both hold certain notes longer than conventional timing would allow, and to take pauses for dramatic effect, most notably in the last section of verse after he sings "And here I am in this uniformish pantsuit sorta thing, thinking of the art teacher..." where he then plays without singing for eight beats, emphasizing the silent reflection of the storyteller. The Glass-inspired compositional structure facilitates both his range of vocal inflections and dramatic pauses in a way that flows easily and seems very natural.

Personally, every time I start listening to this song after not hearing it for a long time, I break down into tears. Like, within the first ten seconds, because I remember what it's about, and where it takes me emotionally. It all comes rushing back, and I lose my composure. It's deeply personal, and touches a nerve that I forget I have in me. It's not about the specific subject of affection in the lyrics, because I never had a crush on any teacher or other adult when I was a kid, but rather the iridescently intense longing for passionate love and the regret of unrequited lust that seems to mainly accompany a specific period of one's youth. Now many decades in retrospect, I think it's one of the most vividly bittersweet emotional memories that anyone can have. This song takes me right back to that feeling, like a time machine. It's eerie that Wainwright can not only connect with that emotional experience himself but channel it so perfectly into words and music that anyone who's ever had those feelings is instantly transported back in time to their own experience. I think it's normal for most people to bury a lot of the emotional trauma that they went through as teenagers, because for the most part it's teen angst bullshit that people just work through as they mature. But none of that shit ever goes away: It's still down there inside your mind, shoved back behind years and years of living and learning. For me, and a lot of other Wainwright fans apparently, this song taps into that specific feeling in an almost shockingly effective way. I can't think of any other song that pushes that button for me with the same intensity.

All this having been said, I have a personal story to share from the other side of the song's scenario. In the mid-1990s I started my current career by working as a paraprofessional in a middle school. I worked out of the school library, and though I taught no classes, every kid that hung out in the library got to know me. I was in my mid-20s and only "out" to a few fellow faculty members, and the students were all about ten years younger. As you might expect, some of them took more of a shine to me than others, and vice versa. I will never forget one kid, though I didn't know him well enough to remember his name, who came to me one afternoon to ask me about what he should do "about being different". He didn't say specifically what he meant by that, but he didn't need to. In my response I danced around the specific nature of that difference and assured him that while growing up different would be much more difficult than not, it would be something he could navigate through, and that it wasn't so bad being different once you were a grownup. In fact, being different would give him a special perspective on life that he would ultimately find helpful in many ways. I didn't think much more about that conversation until the last day of school, when I was standing in the courtyard outside the classroom buildings with all the other faculty waving goodbye to the kids as they left for the summer, some of them for the last time as they would be going off to high school. Seemingly out of nowhere, that kid came running up to me and threw his arms around my waist, burying his face in my chest in a bear hug. I was too surprised to react other than to hold my arms out, and in the milliseconds that it took me to realize what he was doing, I impulsively started moving my arms toward him to return the hug, at which point he broke off and ran away toward the busses. The whole thing lasted about three seconds and he never said a word, but he didn't need to. Sometimes I wonder whatever happened to that kid, and I wonder if he ever thinks about me. Somehow it feels right to imagine that he might.

Since transcribing the entire lyrics of a song in a writeup without permission is not typically compliant with fair use, I'll do you one better. Here's a link to an audio file of the song so you can listen to it yourself. Go ahead, cry your eyes out. You'll feel better afterward.

Sources:
https://web.archive.org/web/20120224083305/http://www.interscope.com/artist/news/default.aspx?nid=13533&aid=999
http://www.philly.com/philly/entertainment/music/20160523_Rufus_Wainwright_at_the_Foundry__bewitched__bothered_and_bewildered.html
http://www.bristol247.com/channel/culture/music/reviews/review-rufus-wainwright-colston-hall-bristol
https://books.google.com/books?id=z2OSCwAAQBAJ&pg=PA237