[4] The tape impressed Wainwright's father, who passed the songs along to producer Van Dyke Parks, who in turn presented them to DreamWorks executive Lenny Waronker.

"[9] The duo, with Ethan Johns, also contributed the songs "Le Roi D'Ys" and "Banks of the Wabash" (both "contemporary" cover versions) to the 1997 soundtrack to the film The Myth of Fingerprints.

[13] In December 1998, Wainwright appeared in a Gap television advertisement in which he performed Frank Loesser's 1947 song "What Are You Doing New Year's Eve?

[1] The "neo-operatic" opening track "Foolish Love", arranged by Van Dyke Parks, was described by AllMusic contributor Matthew Greenwald as a "lush, orchestral-soaked ballad, with incredible strings".

[17] The song "Danny Boy", with its "fabulous wordplay that stays literate and easy to understand at the time", contains "subtle" horn lines and sampled percussion.

[18] According to biographer Kirk Lake, "Danny Boy" is a companion piece to "Foolish Love" and together they represent the start and end of a relationship between a gay and a straight man.

[19][20] Wainwright sings of being so blinded by love that he fails to notice the "ship with eight sails" threatening to come around the bend, a reference to Bertolt Brecht's 1928 musical The Threepenny Opera.

[19] The chorus in "April Fools" begins with an "unusually upbeat attitude" and was considered by Greenwald to be the most accessible track on the album.

[21] Driven by Wainwright's guitar playing, "In My Arms" was described by Greenwald as a "forlorn", Spanish-influenced ballad that sounded as though it "could have been recorded in France in the 1920s".

[29] The song is loosely about AIDS and contains the Italian language lyric "Fuggi, regal fantasima", taken from Giuseppe Verdi's opera Macbeth.

[32] Wainwright said the following of "Damned Ladies", which contains references to nine opera heroines: "In the song, I lament how these women are constantly dying brutal deaths, which I can see coming but cannot stop.

[38] Directed by Sophie Muller, the video features Wainwright in Los Angeles "amidst a clique of classic opera characters" such as Madame Butterfly, attempting to prevent each of them from committing suicide.

[37] The video also contains cameo appearances by No Doubt's Gwen Stefani, a friend of Muller's, and Hole bassist Melissa Auf der Maur, a high school acquaintance and former roommate of Wainwright's.

Speaking of second-generation artists emerging around the same time, AllMusic's Jason Ankeny wrote that Wainwright "deserves to be heard regardless of his family tree".

Furthermore, Ankeny complimented the musician for his songwriting abilities and his "knack for elegantly rolling piano melodies and poignantly romantic lyrics".

[51] Los Angeles Times critic Marc Weingarten found that the "abiding, uncynical" view of love expressed in Wainwright's lyrics does not come off as "mawkish" due to his considerable skills as a songwriter and arranger.

[46] NME reviewer John Mulvey called the album "floridly impersonal" and "grandiosely arranged", but also criticized Wainwright for being "too overwrought and naff".

[47] Greenwald complimented Martha's backing vocals on the song "In My Arms", as well as Parks' "positively sterling" string arrangement on "Millbrook".

[22][23] Furthermore, he praised the vocal duet between Rufus and Martha on "Sally Ann", claiming that a similar sibling performance had not been heard since the Everly Brothers.

Kun asserted that the songs were "built on a similar set of angled melodies and hairpin turns of phrase", and that each "succeeds as its own distinctly intimate portrait of emotion and desire.

[37][54] Rufus Wainwright was nominated four times by the Gay & Lesbian American Music Awards, an organization that provided the foundation for the recognition of the excellence of LGBT artists.

[40][59] In 2001, Michael Giltz of The Advocate wrote that Wainwright's biggest sales boost came from the Gap advertisement rather than radio play.

[60] Despite low sales, Wainwright reached number 24 on Billboard's Top Heatseekers chart, and Rolling Stone named him 1998's Best New Artist.