A Conversation with Loudon Wainwright III – HuffPost 9.8.14

Mike Ragogna: You’ve got a new album, Haven’t Got The Blues Yet and it looks like you’re kind of expanding your style here. What prompted that?

Loudon Wainwright: The producer on the new record, Haven’t Got The Blues is this fellow called David Mansfield, who’s highly regarded and pretty well-known as an all-arounder, a guy who plays a lot of the instruments that have strings on them, I believe; fiddles and guitars and pedal steel guitar and mandolin. He’s also a friend of mine and has been on a lot of my records over the years. The way the record came about is that he has a little studio in Maplewood, New Jersey, and I used to go out there and he had some skills on the board, being an engineer. We just put this together over the period of about a year. I don’t think we were thinking conceptually of what was going to make this one particularly different; Older Than My Old Man Now focused a lot on death and decay of course and the new one is death and decay and depression!

MR: Well, there’s your expansion.

LW: I’m heading in a new direction: Down!

MR: [laughs] Yeah, yeah. Okay, how did the songs come about for this one?

LW: Some of them are new. “Lookin At The Calendar” is new. Some of them are old. “In A Hurry” was written maybe even ten years ago. Some of these songs need homes. What I’ve been doing on some of the last records is taking a bunch of songs and trying to create a fifteen minute sonic experience and explore a couple of themes along the way.

MR: Where do you get your inspiration as a writer?

LW: It’s hard to be objective about oneself. I don’t know what’s different, it doesn’t feel like anything has changed in the 40 years that I’ve been writing songs. Basically, what happens is I get an idea or something pisses me off or amuses me or upsets me, certainly, something happens to people who I love or people who I love do something to me and then I find myself grabbing a piece of paper and writing some words down and putting a guitar in my lap and trying to fashion a little tune for it. That’s pretty much how it’s always been. I guess my sensibilities have changed or coarsened over the years, I don’t know, but it all feels pretty much like it was just yesterday.

MR: Which brings us to your new soon-to-be holiday classic, “I’ll Be Killing You This Christmas.”

LW: Yeah. That’s a song I wrote about a year ago. I wrote it after the Newtown, Connecticut shooting. Occasionally, I get into social commentary. I’m old enough to remember when there was such thing as a protest song. I used to go to the Newport Folk Festival and hear Pete Seeger sing them. After that horrible shooting I was sitting around my house with the Christmas tree having just been erected and I made a little joke to myself, “I’ll be killing you this Christmas,” thinking that the song was going to become about a guy wanting to kill his wife or his girlfriend or something. Then all of a sudden, this gun thing swerved into the picture and it became a little more serious than that. It’s an interesting song, but it’s a tricky one. You have to be careful where you sing it but I’m happy that it came out.

MR: “God & Nature” has an interesting perspective take as well.

LW: Yeah. My mom, who was southern Baptist from Georgia always wanted me to be a preacher. Instead I decided I wanted to be an actor and a performer, but that song is like Episcopalian gospel music or something. It was a funny song that just kind of came out, I’m not even sure why. I do know that I was watching some of the debates in the lead-up to the 2012 presidential election, as I recall I was somewhat inspired by some of that stuff.

MR: What are you looking at in the news these days?

LW: Well now it’s a question of what’s making me look away, actually. When you see four kids on a beach that just got blown away… The news has always been pretty bad, but it just seems particularly dreadful in so many different places, but in the Middle East in particular. It’s tough to watch the news or read the newspaper or to dwell on it. In terms of writing songs about it, I don’t know where I would begin to write about any of that stuff.

MR: It seems like politics nowadays is all about “I’m not going to let your side win.” They went after Bill Clinton and now Barack Obama viciously. Do you think this has been happening for a long time or did things get worse when Obama got in? That’s sort of the elephant in the room.

LW: Well, it’s hard not to think that some people didn’t just make up their minds to say “no” about everything. I know that there are theories and even evidence about that. Politics at that level, it’s a mystery to me how it’s done. I don’t know why anybody would even want to do it.

MR: Do you think there’s any way out of the extremely toxic legislative environment?

LW: Unfortunately, I’m enough of a pessimist to think that things are probably going to get worse. I don’t know, you’d like to think that there isn’t a really viable republican out there, but who knows?

MR: Now, you also have this show, The Posthumous Collaboration. What is that?

LW: When I made Older Than My Old Man Now, one of the parts of that record was that I included a couple of selections of my father’s writing, I recited them on the record and then connected them to a couple of my father’s songs. My dad was quite a well-known journalist in the sixties and seventies and eighties, he wrote for Life magazine, he had a column called “The View From Here.” When those columns first came out, I didn’t really read a lot of them because of the father-son whatever. But I went back a few years ago after I made my record and I read all his work. Then I got this idea that I could, as you say or as I said, have a kind of posthumous collaboration, combining and connecting some of my songs with my dad’s writing. He died in 1988. It’s been great, we originally did it down in North Carolina last September, in Chapel Hill, and then we just finished four Monday nights in New York at a theater in Midtown. I’m looking around for a more permanent home for the piece, it’s about an eighty minute piece of about thirteen songs and a lot of my dad’s writing. I’m having a blast doing it and people seem to like it also.

MR: Is it an evolving show? There’s got to be a degree of improv in there, no?

LW: Parts of it are nailed down. I’m trying to find the right combinations and get a flow to it. I’ve been performing for long enough to know there has to be an arc to the evening, the eighty minutes, but it’s still in development, so to speak. I think I’m close to having it pretty much finished and again, hopefully, I’m going to get to perform it in some town somewhere for a certain amount of time.

MR: You said you wanted to be an actor at one point. When did your focus shift more toward music?

LW: Well, in the late sixties I went to Carnegie Mellon, which used to be called Carnegie Tech, which is a fine acting school in Pittsburg. But then I dropped out and became a hippie and did that for a while and then wrote a song. So that’s how I swerved over to music in about 1968. But occasionally, I dabble in the dark arts of thespianism. But I earn my bread and butter mostly as a singer-songwriter.

MR: I so remember your appearance on M.A.S.H. as Captain Spalding.

LW: The singing surgeon!

MR: And there’s your appearance as an obstetrician in the movie Knocked Up.

LW: Oh yeah. It was great to get Katherine Heigl up there in the stirrups. I need to thank, my old pal Judd Apatow, who’s been great. He gave me and Joe Henry that job to write the music, he’s given me parts in a couple of his projects, acting roles. He’s expressed an interest in this theatrical thing I’m doing, Surviving Twin. Judd is my patron, I love Judd.

MR: [laughs] Speaking of the hippie generation, you wrote “Dead Skunk In The Middle Of The Road,” one of your trademark songs and an anthem of the era.

LW: I thought you were going to talk about “The Acid Song.”

MR: [laughs] Right on! Let’s get there, too!

LW: If we want to talk hippie, let’s talk “The Acid Song.” But yes, “Dead Skunk.” We talked about the elephant in the room, now let’s talk about the dead skunk! Speaking of Bill Clinton, it was number one in Little Rock, Arkansas, for six consecutive weeks in 1973.

MR: [laughs] Was that because of Bill Clinton?

LW: I somehow imagine that he and Hillary were making out in the back of a rambler station wagon and that song was on the AM radio while he was you-know-what-ing.

MR: I’m pretty sure I read that in her book Hard Choices.

LW: Yes! Hopefully. But the “skunk” thing sure paid for a lot of child support, let’s put it that way.

MR: I guess we ought to weasel on over to that topic.

LW: Let’s do the family thing!

MR: Yeah. You’ve been associated with the McGarrigle and Roche musical dynasties. You’re father to Rufus Wainwright–who, at this point, is almost as iconic as his dad–plus two more amazing talents, Martha and Lucy…

LW: Well, Rufus and his sister Martha, who’s also in show business, are my kids from my marriage to Kate McGarrigle. Kate and I split up when Rufus was three and Martha was just a few months old. In terms of the nurturing, I’d say I was a part-time nurturer and Kate did the lioness’ share of the nurturing, and she was quite a lioness. Rufus and Martha and my daughter Lucy Wainwright Roche, daughter of another fabulous artist, Suzzy Roche, those kids have been around show business forever. Then I have this twenty-one year old daughter who can play the guitar, so look out.

MR: Seems like there are some pretty awesome genetics at work here.

LW: I suppose since the moms were artists, the deck might have been genetically stacked, so to speak.

MR: What’s your view of the “singer-songwriter” genre these days?

LW: You’ve got me. My focus is mostly subjective. I’ve been trying to do my job, which is come up with the next song. In terms of what’s happening to the scene or folk or Americana or whatever you want to call it–guys and gals who play guitars–it’s the same five chords everybody’s playing. They’re singing about themselves and what’s happening in the world. In that regard, it hasn’t changed much. I suppose some of the haircuts have changed, but then they come back around to what they used to be. I don’t know what I can say. I try not to even listen to other singer-songwriters. That is my idea of a bad time. Trapped on an island listening to the new John Prine or Steve Forbert album would be torture. I think those guys are great, but I prefer dead black jazz piano players like Thelonius Monk if I’m on my desert island.

MR: Not even Steve Forbert songs? Sorry, that was my shameless plug for Steve Forbert.

LW: I love Steve Forbert, and that’s why I don’t want to listen to his songs. I love him too much, I don’t want to hate him.

MR: Loudon, what advice do you have for new artists?

LW: Play the guitar every day for fifteen minutes. I really don’t know, I can’t offer any advice, I can just only say, “Good luck and get a real job.”

MR: [laughs] Is that what you would have told Loudon Wainwright III?

LW: No, I’m being disingenuous. I think it’s great to not have a real job. I’m a guy who’s not had a real job for almost fifty years. I think that’s the goal in life; to somehow make a living without having to really have a job.

MR: One last thing. “Man And Dog,” what’s the story behind that one?

LW: Ah, yes. I live up there in the upper west side of New York and Harry, our dog has to be walked, as do I. We go out there and fool around in the dark–it’s not what you think, of course. People love that song. In fact, we’re going to make a video of that song next week. I expect it’ll be going viral soon. There you go, I’m going to have another funny animal song that’s going to be a hit. The bookends of my career!

MR: And let’s talk about your Grammy win, sir. You got Best Traditional Folk Album for High, Wide & Handsome.

LW: Yeah, how about that? I have to thank the guy who had the idea and also produced and paid for the record, a wonderful guy called Dick Connette. He also produced Older Than My Old Man Now. I told Dick that I loved Charlie Poole’s records from back in the twenties and Dick said, “Well let’s do the Charlie Poole Project.” It’s thirty-five tracks–two CDs, a seventy four-page booklet–and we won the Grammy. So thanks so much to Dick Connette for that. Not to mention Charlie Poole, of course.

MR: What’s in the future beyond Surviving Twin?

LW: I’m not looking beyond that. I’m hoping we can do that somewhere and then I’m out there hoping and wishing and fishing for the next song, because that’s my real job. It’s not real work, of course, but I’ve got to write the next song. That’s how you keep going in this line of work.

Transcribed by Galen Hawthorne