Rufus Wainwright / The McGarrigle Christmas Hour / 2005
What Are You Doing New Year's Eve
tender, anxious, quietly hopeful
This is a cover of Frank Loesser's 1947 standard, delivered by Rufus Wainwright as a wistful, slightly nervous romantic overture set against New Year's Eve pageantry. The song's whole tension lives in the gap between the narrator's outward composure and his private fear of being left out of the pairing-off that the holiday demands.
romantic longing vulnerability and self-doubt loneliness amid celebration time and ritual hope against odds
Who's speaking
A first-person suitor addresses a specific 'you' directly, asking a plain question but revealing, in asides and hedges, how much is riding on the answer. The voice is self-aware about its own long odds, which makes it feel more sincere than boastful.
What happens
The song opens with a communal image of celebration, then narrows immediately to personal anxiety about whether the speaker will be included in that coupling. He works up the nerve to ask his real question, retreats into self-deprecation about his chances, imagines a rival's arms around the person he wants, then returns to the same question with slightly more urgency, as if repetition might will the answer into being.
How it's built
The song is built on a simple call-and-response logic: each verse builds doubt or imagined rivalry, and each release resolves into the same repeated question, which functions like a refrain even though the song has no traditional chorus. This circularity mirrors the way an unanswered question loops in a nervous mind. Wainwright's arrangement, with the McGarrigles' folk-adjacent, chamber-pop warmth, leans into intimacy rather than the big-band swing of the original Loesser standard, softening the plea into something more confessional.
Section by section
Opening verse
“will I be among the missing”
The song starts with festive imagery before pivoting hard into personal insecurity. This line crystallizes the fear driving the whole song: not rejection exactly, but exclusion from a scene where everyone else seems paired off.
First refrain
The speaker frames his question as almost too forward, hedging it with an apology about timing. The casualness of the phrasing is a performance; the stakes underneath are clearly higher than the tone admits.
Second verse
Here the speaker imagines someone else embracing the person he wants at the stroke of midnight. This intrusion of a rival, even a faceless one, sharpens the urgency and explains why he's asking now rather than waiting.
Third verse
“out of the thousand invitations you received”
The hyperbole about competing invitations is self-effacing but also flattering to the addressee, casting them as someone in high demand. It lets the speaker minimize his own chances while still making his interest plain.
Final refrain
The repeated question returns with a small escalation, calling itself out as the big ask. The song ends without resolution, on the open question itself, which preserves the romantic suspense rather than tying it off.
Craft
- rhetorical question as refrain
- The central question is asked twice, framing the entire song as an act of asking rather than telling, which keeps the emotional stakes suspended rather than resolved.
- synecdoche
- Ringing bells, blowing horns, and kissing couples stand in for the whole apparatus of New Year's Eve celebration, letting a few sensory details evoke an entire social scene.
- self-deprecating hedge
- Phrases that undercut the speaker's own hope function as a defensive move, protecting him from embarrassment while still letting the request stand.
- imagined rival
- The unnamed arms that might hold the beloved at midnight introduce a competing suitor purely through implication, heightening the stakes without ever naming an antagonist.
Reading it
The most persuasive reading treats this as a portrait of romantic risk-taking dressed in polite, almost old-fashioned language: the speaker knows he may be laughed off but asks anyway, and the song's charm is in that mix of nerve and self-deprecation. An alternative reading leans harder into the holiday-specific dread, treating New Year's Eve less as a romantic opportunity than as an annual deadline that forces people to confront who they'll be with and who they won't, making the song as much about loneliness as about courtship.
Context
The song is a standard written by Frank Loesser in 1947, recorded countless times by artists across jazz, pop, and folk traditions. This version appears on The McGarrigle Christmas Hour, a 2005 holiday album led by Kate and Anna McGarrigle, Rufus Wainwright's mother and aunt, with Wainwright as a guest vocalist; the album leans toward intimate, folk-inflected arrangements of seasonal songs rather than big-band standards. I don't have detailed information about the specific recording session or Wainwright's personal intentions behind this particular performance.
Listen for
- how the vocal delivery leans into vulnerability rather than swagger on the refrain
- the way the arrangement's intimacy contrasts with the song's big-band origins
- the small escalation in urgency between the first and second refrain
- how the imagined rival's midnight embrace is handled musically, whether with tension or resignation
About Rufus Wainwright
Rufus McGarrigle Wainwright is a Canadian and American singer, songwriter, and composer. He has recorded eleven studio albums and numerous tracks on compilations and film soundtracks.
b. 1973 / Montréal
Full biography and catalogue