Rufus Wainwright has said of his new album, Poses, that it's a play with a cast of intriguing characters, but his voice is the star. If that sounds a touch egotistical, you'd be right, for Wainwright is not backward about coming forward. Yet his is a tolerable ego, laced more with humour than hubris and, besides, he says his voice is the star in the context of his self-titled 1999 dΘbut.

"The first album was more a ton of bricks hitting you when you heard it first. I thought my voice was sometimes overshadowed by the complex arrangements and 20,000 violins and stylaphones. For Poses, one of the co-producers, Pierre Marchand, wanted it to be about my voice. I worked more on recording it in different fashions, using different microphones, trying to sing softly - which was very hard for me, as I tend to belt it out. So I had to navigate that. It was great experimenting that way.

"This second album was just for me, in terms of expressing myself artistically and also in terms of maybe trying to become a little more accessible for a more mainstream audience. I'm happy how that worked out, and I don't feel as if I disappointed my old fans. In fact, I think I gained some new ones."

If the surname sounds familiar, it's because you probably know the work of his father, Loudon Wainwright III, a fine satiric chronicler of the ordinary, everyday occurrence. And his mother is Kate McGarrigle, another much lauded contemporary folk singer (with an Irish background). With those two as parents, it was perhaps inevitable that Wainwright turned his hand to showbiz and not, say, plumbing or banking (two fine, upstanding careers, but hardly conducive to writing songs such as Watch Me Rock, I'm Over 30).

"I've been enveloped by a certain type of music that, though it is popular, is a generation behind what I do. Perhaps because my mother sings a lot of parlour songs and is very into old folk music, that was the kind of stuff we learnt at home.

"I was more wrapped up in the actual performing and writing of music as opposed to being an audiophile. I had a lot of time and a lot of encouragement to work on it. It was inevitable, but it also took a lot of work and time to figure things out. Maybe that's not necessary for everyone, but for what I do, it was crucial. If I hadn't had that time and encouragement, it would have been a whole other story.

"What would I have been if not for music? Probably a painter, because it's quiet and something completely involved with one's own anonymity. The more I get into this showbiz thing the more I admire those who can hide."

But he never wanted to hide, he says. In fact, this is where his subtle ego kicks in, as Wainwright reckons he's OK with the small amount of fame he has - he can still walk around, go into cafΘs with sunglasses on and wait for people to notice him. He admits there's still a "sick attention-grabbing person there; it'll never die", but he agrees that the closer one gets to the flame, in terms of celebrity-hood, the greater the gap created between one's own time and life and what one has to do to maintain a celebrity profile.

His music is not mainstream (which could eventually kibosh his high-flying ambitions), but it's getting there. If his first album was strangled by over-ambitious everything-and-the-kitchen-sink arrangements, his new one is a supermodel of restraint, by comparison. Real songs, with ultrasmart melodies and lyrics - he's not a chip off the old block, but then he doesn't want to be. On Poses, his his success as a songwriter is validated by his own incisive talent and not via historically induced goodwill.

Of course, being a Wainwright, there's a notable delicious irony in the fact that Wainwright is gay. When he was a baby, his father wrote a song called Rufus is a Tit Man. The right parental sentiment, perhaps, but most certainly the wrong song title.

"Being gay enhances my lifestyle," hesays. "It's difficult to be gay in the music industry. There's a lot of prejudice and there could very well be a glass ceiling that I'm heading for at full throttle and will smash. But I've always harked back to almost pre-Stonewall characters such as Oscar Wilde, Tchaikovsky or even Freddie Mercury - people who entertained. I come from a great tradition and I'm proud of that."

Wainwright says he particularly wanted Poses to be fresh and to reflect that lifestyle. He also admits it was as cool as cool can be to have a form of notoriety which he'd always craved.

"I wanted to write about the first moments of realising that, the spirit of it, the 'now I'm hip and cool and everybody wants to be my friend' kinda thing. But there's so much bullshit in that. I didn't so much see through it quickly, as I knew what parts of it I wanted. At one end, there's the bullshit, but on the other I quickly realised it's a game. If you treat it like that and don't take it to heart, and use the bullshit as fertiliser, then it can be quite productive."

He remarks on his Irish background and how it taught him to drink for pleasure, to not feel afraid of having a good time. He says he knows where to draw the line, however.

"You get offered more cocktail parties and more things, illicit things, that can become pitfalls," he says. "The major difficulty is when you get so much praise. A while back, I performed in front of 50,000 people at a gay?????/