Loudon Wainwright III kept singing stunningly good new songs at the World Cafe Live on Thursday, and audience members kept calling out for old ones. Such is life for a vital-as-ever artist of Wainwright's vintage, who's 61 years old and has been making pointed, painfully funny, unflinchingly autobiographical music since 1970. Nobody in pop music writes about family better than LWIII, the author of "Rufus Is A Tit Man" and father of songwriters Rufus and Martha Wainwright and Lucy Wainwright Roche.
At the World Cafe, he opened with a new one called "Hat" ("It looks good on a hook, bad on a bed") about the first word Lucy ever spoke, did Oedipal battle with his deceased Dad (one-time Life magazine editor Loudon Wainwright II) in "Surviving Twin," and told poignant tales of drinking on the front porch with his late mother in "White Winos." He did songs from last year's Strange Weirdos: Music From And Inspired By the Film Knocked Up, a movie in which he played Catherine Heigl's gynecologist ("Nice work if you can get it," he quipped). And, while more than ably accompanying himself on acoustic guitar, he did unrecorded songs about time. loss and the International Date Line, and one called "A Guilty Conscience And A Broken Heart," which, he joked, combined the two typical topics he's written about in the early and latter stages of his career, those being "shitty love, and death and decay."
And along the way, while ignoring the calls for "Dead Skunk," he somewhat grudgingly sang some oldies, going back to his "New Dylan" days for "Muse Blues" and "Drinking Song." Wainwright's a marvel of ongoing high-level creativity of a kind that can only be attained when an artist refuses to dwell on the past. And he made that point, with an edge in his voice, on "Old Friend." a kiss-off song from 1971 that no one requested, on which he self-contemptuously copped to kissing "the past's ass, all night long." "The good old days are good and gone," the folk singer sang. "That's why they're good, because they're gone."
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