Rufus Wainwright has lent his voice to some timeless words over the years, from modern classics penned by Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell to the traditional songs on last year’s Folkocracy project. But he’s never before used those golden tones to sing about something quite as grand as The Lord of the Rings — until now.
The second season of Amazon’s splashy prequel series The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power features Wainwright singing lead vocals on a song called “Old Tom Bombadil,” written by composer Bear McCreary. “I’m very, very choosy about what I choose to sing, and I was really happy with what Bear offered,” the singer-songwriter, 51, tells Rolling Stone.
As the title suggests, it’s a ballad about the character Tom Bombadil, who made a memorable appearance in J.R.R. Tolkien’s original 1954 novel The Fellowship of the Ring but was cut from Peter Jackson’s 2001 film of the same name. In Season Two of The Rings of Power, he’s played by Rory Kinnear. Bombadil is an intriguing character in the novels, with a curiously lackadaisical attitude toward the ring that enthralls nearly everyone else in Middle-earth. He’s a figure of endless fascination for fantasy fans, and it’s a treat to hear Wainwright singing Tolkien’s words: “Old Tom Bombadil is a merry fellow/Bright blue his jacket is, and his boots are yellow…”
(You can hear the song — which is debuting exclusively on Amazon Music today, and will arrive on other streaming services tomorrow — right here.)
Wainwright read and liked the LOTR books as a teenager, though he admits he’s more of a Narnia person. “I enjoy all great sagas,” he says. “I’m a big opera fan, and my husband and I listen to Wagner a lot. I love to read Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. I like anything that’s long and involved and complicated and keeps your attention away from this frightening planet.”
Since moving back to L.A. a few years ago, he’s gotten to know McCreary (“He’s come over to our house with his beautiful family a few times, and our daughters have hung out”), and when the composer asked him to sing about Tom Bombadil, he said yes right away.
“Bear briefed me on how this character that fans of the books are so enamored of is finally making his appearance, and he thought of my voice as an incarnation of that,” Wainwright says. “I’m very flattered. I understand it, too, in a way — because I am somewhat mysterious. Not everybody knows who Rufus Wainwright is, for better or for worse. So I think it’s a nice pairing.”
Reminded of the long tradition of folk and rock music inspired by Lord of the Rings, including at least three Led Zeppelin songs, Wainwright gives a nod to his friend Robert Plant: “He came to a Folkocracy show not too long ago, and he’s a big fan of my dad’s.”
For Wainwright, this song about Middle-earth’s ancient history fits into his recent work exploring folk music. “The whole idea of singing that way is that it’s something that you have to be able to sing a capella, surrounded with friends and family around a fire or something,” he says. “It has to have that kind of purity. You just go back into the spirit of your ancestors.”
Folkocracy was a success, garnering a Grammy nomination for Best Folk Album at this year’s awards. “I lost to Joni Mitchell, which is, I suppose, OK,” Wainwright quips. He’s currently getting ready to send that album off in high style with a show at New York’s Carnegie Hall on Nov. 29. “That’s the big goodbye for that project,” he adds.
Next, he’s working on bringing his Dream Requiem to Los Angeles for its U.S. premiere on May 4, 2025. “It’s this huge classical requiem piece, interwoven with some poetry by Byron,” says Wainwright, who’s eyeing “some very fun people” for the narrator role that Meryl Streep played at the Paris premiere earlier this summer. “I think I may have unfortunately written my masterpiece,” he adds with a laugh.
Jay-Z performing at the Stade de France in Saint-Denis in Paris.
Jay-Z Deserves the Super Bowl Halftime Gig
Where’s the love? Jay-Z asked that question 25 years ago, in the chorus of one of many songs in his catalog that still move audiences today. If he performs “Heart of the City” as part of his Super Bowl halftime show next February, those indignant bars are sure to be a highlight: “First the Fat Boys break up, now every day I wake up, somebody got a problem with Hov…” It would be an appropriate choice, too — because then as now, any time Jay-Z notches a new achievement, people find a way to complain.
The jokes and nonsense started almost as soon as the first rumors trickled out that Jay, whose company Roc Nation has executive-produced the Super Bowl halftime show since 2019, might be choosing himself to headline next year’s show. “Jay-Z just Dick Cheney’d himself for the Super Bowl,” Puck‘s Matthew Belloni quipped on X last week, alluding to the time that the late prince of darkness, who’d been asked to run the vice-presidential search committee for George W. Bush’s 2000 campaign, put himself on the ticket. (Super hip and current reference, and not at all apples-and-oranges.) Others pointed to TMZ reports that pop stars like Harry Styles and Justin Bieber had been asked first. “How are they the frontrunners, and he end up in the front?” Cam’Ron, who’s delighted in trolling Jay for many years, wondered aloud on his podcast. “Out of all the people on the roster, they couldn’t pick nobody else?” asked Cam’Ron‘s co-host, Ma$e.
These critiques miss the point, which is that Jay-Z is one of the best choices for a high-profile gig like this. He’s a superstar with a comparable level of name recognition to any other A-lister in music. He has a deep stack of classic songs going back decades. And he’s a highly skillful live performer who knows his way around a stadium stage, as he’s spent this year reminding people on his Jay-Z 30 tour. He tore down Yankee Stadium three nights in a row this summer; just last week, he rocked SoFi Stadium, which happens to be the same place where the 2027 Super Bowl is being held. He held the crowd’s attention with ease at all of those shows, and though there were plenty of glittery guests — that’s a given at a Jay show, and it will surely be true at the Super Bowl, too — he did it mostly through the force of his own magnetic energy. Let’s state the obvious here: Jay-Z is really, really good at rapping. We’re talking about one of the slickest, sharpest talkers in the history of words, someone who made it to the top through a sustained act of myth-making, then kept going. Are we seriously asking whether he can handle a 15-minute televised performance?
And yeah, there’s a touch of self-congratulation in the way he appointed himself. So what? Praising his own gifts is arguably Jay-Z’s greatest talent of all. He made a fine art out of self-applause. He told his story again and again, retracing the steps from Marcy Projects to the corner suite, and he made us believe. It would almost be insulting to the audience if he didn’t give himself the gig at some point.
Pop culture observers in recent years surely remember the backlash to Super Bowl headliners like Kendrick Lamar and Bad Bunny — all of it at least culturally conservative, and much of it frankly just racist. The blowback to Jay’s announcement is mostly coming from other quarters, at least for now (let’s just wait to see what the right-wing swamps make of this one). But it’s disappointing in a different way. Jay-Z has spent his career expounding hip-hop as a mainstream commercial force. He’s not a businessman, he’s a business, man. But he’s also an artist. He’s made huge amounts of money, and gotten himself into the rarefied rooms where he even has the ability to give himself a gig like this, by spinning his experiences into compelling narrative art, one verse at a time. Let’s not lose sight of how impressive his life’s work really is. Jay-Z is not some random C-suite bro, and he’s definitely not Dick Cheney. He’s one of the greatest rappers of all time, by any measure. He’s earned that Super Bowl spot.