Career Moves

"The way I see it," Loudon Wainwright III says from his California home, "all I'm really doing is reporting what's going on with me, although obviously I'm aware that what happens to me happens to other people. I've always written a lot about what was going on in my life. When I was young, I sang about growing up and going to boarding school in Westchester County [New York]. Then I got married, and it was rocky, so I wrote about that, and then the kids came along, and they started getting into the songs. I don't see it as a kind of confessional thing; it just seems natural for me to write about myself. I'm what I'm most fixated on.

"And," he adds, "on this particular record what was going on was the death of my mother."

So says the gentleman whose willingness to lay himself open has earned him a long-lasting and enthusiastic fan base. The particular record he speaks of is Last Man on Earth, a late-2001 release on Red House, which finds him inhabiting unique, if not absolutely uncharted, waters.

LW3, as his press packet succinctly puts it--you can tell a fellow's arrived when he rates his own acronym--has been turning his life into music since the late 1960s, and it's become increasingly apparent that a whole crowd of people, young and old alike, have come right along with him. Even before the appearance of Album I in 1970, Wainwright was receiving accolades from contemporaries like John Prine, Kris Kristofferson and Steve Goodman. But Wainwright's peculiar talent lay in his wry wit, a skewed view of the world and the way people get thrown together, which has informed his music from the beginning. Of his peers, only Goodman, who died far too young in 1984, approached Wainwright's gift for decidedly cerebral humor.

Over the course of 30 years, Wainwright has become something of a patron saint for struggling singer-songwriters. Rare is the aspiring acoustic folkie who doesn't have at least one LW3 composition in his arsenal; "Tip That Waitress," "The Acid Song," "The Swimming Song" and "The Man Who Couldn't Cry" are, undoubtedly, being flogged at a hundred open-mike gigs on any given Tuesday night.

Such homage isn't by chance. Wainwright's songs are populated by people who pray to win the traditional Thanksgiving family fight, middle-aged ex-dopers who drop a single unadvised hit of acid and end up advising you to "hold out for mushrooms," and giddy swimmers who devote whole verses to their successful jackknives and cannonballs, not to mention the occasional dead skunk. In his music, that is, Wainwright very often slips into oddball personae, with whom anyone with the cojones to play music in public cannot help but sympathize.

But Wainwright also wrote "Your Mother and I," one of the truest songs about the effects of divorce on children ever penned ("It's nobody's fault/And you're not to blame"). He wrote "Men," which answers a hundred years of the nature vs. nurture argument with a simple, terse summary of gender stereotypes ("When the ship is sinking and they lower the lifeboats/and pass out the life jackets, the men keep on their coats/The women and the children are the ones who must go first/And the ones who try to save their skins are cowards and are cursed"). After the passing of his father he wrote "Sometimes I Forget," in which he describes the man's familiar personal possessions--wallet, passport, wedding ring--left behind, in a painful process immediately recognizable to anyone who's ever lost a loved one.

"Men" and "Sometimes I Forget" appeared on the 1992 album History, which represented something of a gear-shift in Wainwright's subject matter. Always serious about his craft, the songwriter on History also wrote of serious issues--aging, mortality, violence and the distance between people--in a voice he'd rarely indulged previously.

"On almost all of my records, there's at least one, for lack of a better word, 'novelty' song," he notes. "Even on an album like History, which was a pretty serious record, there were a couple of those lighter ones, like 'Talking New Bob Dylan' and 'The Doctor.' I hope Last Man on Earth isn't ponderously heavy, but there aren't any novelty songs on it, unless you include the title song. On this record, we made a conscious decision to leave those kinds of songs off, though there were some we could have put on. I mean, I don't know that [Last Man on Earth] is a great deal different from my previous records. Certainly, I've been writing about family and parents--and the loss of parents--ever since my father died in 1988. So it isn't very groundbreaking in that sense."

Though Last Man on Earth may not examine brand-new subject matter, it does represent something of an album-length meditation on the process of getting older, making it unique in Wainwright's catalog. It took him awhile to come to the music on that record, his first for the Red House label.