Loudon Wainwright III

Folk singer-songwriters tend to fall into one of two categories: those taking themselves far too seriously, and those savvy enough to mix a little humor in with their autobiographical lyrics. Loudon Wainwright III, who plays tomorrow at DuPage College in Glen Ellyn, owes much of his three-decades-long career to the latter approach. Wainwright’s honesty can be downright mundane, whether he’s complaining about people misspelling his name or noting the smell of frozen dog feces thawing out in the spring. In the spirit of his newest album—his 23rd—Recovery, wherein the songwriter revisits songs that have been “overlooked” (according to the liner notes), The A.V. Club took a look back with Wainwright at some of his more humdrum lyrical elements and found out why they inspired songs.

Song: “T.S.M.N.W.A.”
Mundane subject matter: Typos
Sample lyric: “I see my name up there in lights / Then I notice it’s not spelled right.”
Loudon Wainwright: I get my name misspelled all the time, continuously. I think it’s just a question of, as I say in the song, people just not checking. It sounds like “Louden.” I was just in Seattle and there it was on the marquee all over again.
The A.V. Club: Still?
LW: I actually am excited when I see that, ’cause then I can sing that song. But at the last minute somebody told somebody that they had it wrong and they got up there and corrected it, so that’s kind of disappointing. It’s about ignorance more than typos I’d say. I’m pissed off about it. Again, as I say in the song, I’ve been around for a while. So you’d think by now people would have figured it out. But in Seattle at least, the beat goes on.
I write about little things, you know? Little things are big things, or can be anyway. And that’s a good example of that. Mundane is one of my waterfronts.

Song: “Happy Birthday Elvis”
Mundane subject matter: The conspiracy that Elvis Presley still walks among us
Sample lyric: “From a bunker beneath Graceland / The king sits on his throne.”
LW: I’m always on the lookout. And as I recall, it was getting to be Elvis’ birthday and I just went with it. I don’t know why I write these things except that it’s my job. Occasionally I’m asked to do something very specific. I may be wrong—I used to write songs for NPR, though I haven’t done one in a while—but it’s entirely possible that someone there said, “It’s Elvis’ birthday, what can you come up with?” And quite often that’s an incentive. I can’t remember if it was somebody kicking my ass or me doing it myself.
AVC: What’s the most challenging or unusual request you’ve gotten to write a song about from them?
LW: I like to think that I can’t get stumped in that regard.
AVC: You’re just that good?
LW: I’m just that damn good. People are always saying to me, “You should write a song about that.” That’s a pet peeve. It’s just the broadest—“You should write a song about George Bush.” It’s the big shit that you want to avoid, although I have written a couple of songs that he’s in at least. I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of an entire song. I wouldn’t write a song about Sarah Palin. That’s a waterfront I don’t want to go to.
AVC: Has anyone pitched you, “You should write a song about how people are always pitching you song ideas.”
LW: Well, that’s an idea. I’ll get right to work on that.

  
“Muse Blues”
Mundane subject matter: Writer’s block.
Sample lyric: “I eat, drink, and I smoke stuff / I don’t know what to do.”
LW: Well, it was an admission, I suppose. That song was written very early in my career, probably 1972. And I had probably experienced minor writer’s block. I’ve never had severe writer’s block. It’s not the first time that I had taken something that’s going on and written about it. It’s just me writing about me. Like everybody else, you get a little desperate when you can’t get it up creatively, and you reach for—
AVC: Creative Viagra?
LW: In those days it was cocaine and alcohol. I’m a traditionalist. I still use that to have sex with. I don’t mess with Viagra. Cocaine and alcohol, marijuana.
AVC: What about for writer’s block nowadays?
LW: I just wait it out. I’ve written so many songs that it would be okay if I stopped writing songs. Continuing that sexual analogy, it just keeps dribbling out.
AVC: And you just can’t help yourself?
LW: Yeah, now it’s a form of incontinence. “What I need is a good diaper!”
AVC: A creative diaper or a literal one?
LW: You’re going to have to figure that one out there.

“You Don’t Want To Know”
Mundane subject matter: The smell of thawing dog crap.
Sample lyric: “I took my dog for a walk, she took a crap / You won’t smell it until April or May.
LW: I didn’t even have a dog then. That’s that creative imagination, creating a life for yourself. I had seen frozen dog shit before, and it was an interesting idea, the thawing aspect. That’s all that was, really, just imagining that I had a dog.
AVC: What kind of dog did you imagine you had?
LW: I didn’t have to go that far, just a dog that shits, you know? Now I have a dog.
AVC: Does it shit?
LW: I would like to imagine that it doesn’t shit, but unfortunately it does. Not only that but it has coprophagia. It’s the propensity to eat ones shit in general. Actually I’ve written a song called “Coprophagia,” but it’s about trying to get an acting job.
AVC: This is before you had a dog?
LW: This is a new song, I wrote this yesterday. No, no, I wrote it a while ago. But it hasn’t appeared on anything.
AVC: Did the act of coprophagia inspire that?
LW: Well, trying to get an acting job is like eating shit. Watching my dog eat shit, I made the connection there. That was the idea. You’re really getting a good look into my swinging life here. I hope you’re satisfied.

“Rufus Is A Tit Man”
Mundane subject matter: Breastfeeding
Sample lyric: “Rufus is a tit man / Suckin’ on his mamma’s gland.”
LW: Yeah, lets move up the body. Breastfeeding: Observing it and everything that goes along with it.
AVC: In your songwriting, is it the sort of thing where the moment passes and it inspires it, or do you sit down to write and the inspiration then hits you?
LW: It’s a little of both. Again, I’m always looking around, and thinking about what could be a song. “Rufus Is A Tit Man” is a perfect example of that. It’s an amazing thing to watch and do, I suppose, though I can’t quite remember. I was just riffing on that.
AVC: When you play these songs live about moments past, how easily can you reconnect with that inspiration?
LW: At the moment of singing them the audience—hopefully they’re laughing during that particular song—there’s a connection that’s made. As it turns out Rufus [Wainwright] is not much of a tit man. But that doesn’t matter.

“The Man Who Couldn’t Cry”
Mundane subject matter: Chess, waiting for time to pass
Sample lyric: “He played lots of chess and made lots of friends / And he wept every time it would rain.”
LW: That song is almost all made up. I don’t play chess; I never did really. It’s kind of completely allegorical that song. I decided that he plays a lot of chess.
AVC: Why?
LW: Don’t know. Just random.
AVC: So it could have been anything?
LW: Yeah.
AVC: Chinese Checkers? Yahtzee? Jenga?
LW: Chutes And Ladders.

“School Days”
Mundane subject matter: Life as a grade-schooler
Sample lyric: “My pimple pencil pains I would bring / To frogs who sat entranced.”
LW: That’s just alliteration. You should know that. There’s a lot, probably too much, alliteration in that song. But that’s a literal memory also of—there was this pond, I went to this boarding school in Delaware called St. Andrews. There was a pond called the Noxontown Pond. And I just went down there, me and my zits, and would write little poems. Romantic, 15-year-old, acne-covered things.

 “White Winos”
Mundane subject matter: Drinking wine with his mother
Sample lyric: “Mother liked her white wine / She’d have a glass or two.”
LW: Some of these things take off, and you have to finish them, so you figure out a way to finish them. That’s just about the idea of wine and drinking with your mother and where it could go. That’s a song that just started and finished where it finished. And it finishes in a nice way as far as I’m concerned. There is a mystery element with this stuff. You don’t really know how some of it’s going to end up or why it is the way it is. You do make choices, but the choices come to you. And I suppose that’s the muse aspect of it. And the mystery of it is what makes is sexy when it happens. You don’t quite know why it happens, but at this point I’m happy to not know. I’d prefer not to know.
AVC: In that case, what possessed you to go back and do new arrangement of old songs?
LW: Well the reason to make the Recovery was just that—I was working on another record, Strange Weirdoes with Joe Henry, and Joe was a fan of my earlier songs, a lot of which I had forgotten and couldn’t do anymore. And he just thought, wouldn’t it be cool to take this band, this group of musicians, this merry band, and record these songs. Most of which were originally recorded with just a voice and a guitar. And a much different sounding voice, a much higher, piercing, keening voice of a young, twentysomething guy. We recorded one of the songs, “Motel Blues,” and we just liked it. It had a kind of weight to it that the other version didn’t have, a different feeling to it. I’m sure a lot of it had to do with now the singer was 62 or 61, whatever I was when we recorded it. Then we just kept going, until we got 13 songs and we like the way it sounded, and we just kind of put it out there. That was the whole reason for doing it.

AVC: Did you learn anything new about any of these songs?
LW: I’d forgotten some of the songs, so in a sense I re-discovered or recovered the songs. “New Paint” or “Old Friends” or “Saw Your Name In The Paper,” I’d forgotten those songs. I was happy to find them again and I was struck that I thought they were good and kind of interesting in light of what’s happened and all the time that’s gone by. We chose songs that had to do with time and aging, like “Old Friend” and “New Paint.” “Saw Your Name In The Paper” has a new kind of resonance to it now. So we chose a group of songs that we felt the band could play first of all, and that band can play anything, but that would be fun to record. Try to make it something that has a tone to it, or a mood to it. That’s what you’re hoping for.
AVC: Do you still feel like that same person?
LW: I’m the same but I’m different, you know? My concerns haven’t changed much. I’m still as hung up on getting old as I was when I was young—and now that I am old, boy. But the voice has changed a lot and I think the act of singing for all these years has changed—I’m a different singer. That’s another reason to call it Recovery: It’s a different singer that’s covering the songs, not just an older me but a different singer.
AVC: Different how?
LW: Well, again, that would be your judgment. You’d have to go back and A/B the songs, you’d have to listen to the older versions and the newer songs. A little more world-weary, for one thing. But I like to think that I’m a better singer than I was, but maybe that’s wishful thinking on my part. You do something for 40 years and you hope that in some ways at least there’s an improvement. But again, these are all—that’s wishful thinking on my part. I can only hope that the listeners get something out of the record.