Rufus Wainwright make music on his terms with Wallis concert series [Video]

Rufus Wainwright feels the clock ticking. He’s only 51, but when his mother died at the age of 63 it made him “keenly aware that you’ve got to do what you can while you’re here,” he says, “because it could end at any time.”

It’s not exactly a morbid mood inside the small, circular library of Wainwright’s home in Laurel Canyon, the October sun shining warmly on the bear rug and floor-to-ceiling books — but the conversation does begin with death. His mother was Kate McGarrigle, the Quebec-born folk singer-songwriter and “the most talented person I ever met,” Wainwright says. “She had this really uncanny ability to just find music in everything.”

But when she died in 2010, there were several unwritten musicals and many unfinished songs.

“I think she always felt limited,” he says, “and just didn’t have the confidence and the support to fulfill her wildest dreams.”

Wainwright …