The difference between 17 year old Lorde and 68 year old Loudon Wainwright III is the difference between constantly checking whether you are finally an adult and constantly checking to see if you are still alive. It is an ongoing process of decay and degradation and iteration on on his fine, though maybe not as fine as Older Than My Old Man Now, look back in astonishment at pops and at age. LW2 was 63 years old when he died, LWIII is 68 years old.
And the realization is kinda disturbing, that you thought your Daddy was a grown up when he died and five years later and guess what, you aren’t one so maybe he never was one.
As the elder spokesperson for aging and death, Loudon works through blues, soft shoe shuffles, folk and FM ballads as some songs tackle aging, some middle class malaise, some politics, some death straight on, from at the battle to put on your shoes to the struggle and kissing off a lost love, “They pull of the sheet and I ID you”, as he gleefully notes the late lost one “sure got your comeuppance for your pride”.
As the album continues the pitch black humor becomes pitch lack nothing else but Loudon’s skills as a songwriter don’t vary. Every song here is pretty damn good if not much more than pretty damn good, at 68 the cynicism he has never shaken remains but it never infects his songwriting.
Yet, it I a deeply depressing album. LW3 isn’t dying but his observations has some of the mortality of late period Warren Zevon, always in the back of the songs is a my shits fucked her scowl, a deprecation that after wives and children’s and a personal life lived on a public stage there was nothing to ready him from the incredible crumbling artifact of his body.
I think I’d like it more if I was younger, I can feel it too closely and the jokes are too harsh and they are too on me. Still whether singing about dog poop or homelessness, the jokes are funny, the serious stuff is serious, and growing old is worse than you thought it was.
Grade: B+
