A Conversation with Loudon Wainwright III by Frank Goodman (Puremusic.Com, 8/2003) It Was One of Life’S Exciting Coincidences
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A Conversation with Loudon Wainwright III by Frank Goodman (Puremusic.com, 8/2003) It was one of life’s exciting coincidences. Already past the middle of July, I still didn’t have my second of two interviews lined up for the August issue. That’s really loose. I’d spent 10 days earlier in the month having fun in Miami Beach. JB’s got an ocean view mondo condo on the water, in the heart of the South Beach action. I’d driven a truck full of stuff down from Phillly and was enjoying the fruits of my short-lived labors. Got back to Nashville near mid month, and started thinking about who we’d like to have on the cover, who would look good or go well with Ty Baskette, and be a compelling conversation of a different nature. (As time wears on, even without advertisers, you think more about how your cover looks, and how the interviews differ and yet dovetail, things like that.) Like the rest of life, a lot of it is simply timing: who’s got a new record coming out and wants to talk about it enough to schedule interviews. Most artists consider them a real chore, you see, and many interviewers see that they are. We’ve often been told, and we’re always gratified to hear, that our interviews sometimes feel or read a little differently than most. A gang email crossed my desk from a publicist friend. It said that Loudon Wainwright III had a great new live record coming out. So here I’d been presented with an exciting possibility that coincided with an acute need. If only I could get him…one of the greatest singer songwriters of his generation, and father to one of the greatest of the succeeding one (the inimitable Rufus Wainwright). I have a close mutual friend in Nashville who’s been a folk figure since the 60s, Tom Mitchell, and LW3 references abound among Tom’s many funny stories, so I felt like I knew the guy a little already. Received a copy of Loudon’s soon to be released album, So Damn Happy, it’s fabulous. Not just great songs, but he’s a super funny master of the audience throughout, radically intelligent entertainment. The collection is culled from live performances at Largo in Los Angeles and The Mystic Theater in Petaluma, CA. The accompanists supreme on the disc are Van Dyke Parks on piano, Richard Thompson on guitar, David Mansfield on fiddle, guitar, and mandolin. Their contributions are stellar, off the scale. And Martha Wainwright, Loudon’s daughter, also joins him for a duet on “You Never Phone.” This is as good a live record from a singer songwriter as this writer can call to mind. At some point, come over to our Listen page and see what we mean (and by August 19th, you’ll be able to buy it). The artist has a lot going on, as the acting side of his life has also picked up in a major way. He had a near hit with FOX in a series called Undeclared and he appears in Tim Burton’s upcoming film Big Fish, with huge screen stars the likes of Ewan McGregor, Jessica Lange, Albert Finney, Danny DeVito, and Steve Buscemi. (Some of his past credits include Ally McBeal and M*A*S*H, and the film 28 Days, which featured Sandra Bullock.) Some interviews are just more fun than others, and I enjoyed this one very much, he’s a helluva guy. And now, without further ado… Puremusic: Hi, is this Loudon? Loudon Wainwright III: It sure is. PM: Hi, Loudon. This is Frank Goodman from Puremusic. How are you doing? 1 LW: Pretty good, Frank. How are you? PM: Very good. You got a few minutes for us? LW: Yeah. PM: Thanks so much. Man, that’s a great new record. LW: Oh, good. Glad you feel that way about it, Frank. PM: I just thought it was amazing. It had been a little while since I heard a Loudon record. And geez, you just get better every record. LW: The guy I just spoke to, whose name will go unmentioned, started off the interview by saying, “Well, I haven’t heard the album yet, but let’s talk.” PM: Oh, I hate that! LW: Oh, boy, you think you hate it. [laughter] PM: That’s awful. LW: I had a hard time not hanging up on him. So I’m pleased that you listened to it, and took the trouble to do so, and I’m very pleased that you like it. PM: Let’s say a half dozen times this morning alone. LW: All right! PM: Not only are the songs fantastic, but I’m just, as a singer songwriter, amazed by the way you work a room. LW: Well, thank you. PM: I mean, there’s such a tremendous wealth of experience there to do it like that. I’ll say out front, too, that a good friend of mine in town is an old friend of yours, Tom Mitchell. LW: Oh, yeah, Tom. You’re down in Nashville, then. PM: Yeah. LW: Oh, yeah. I just saw Tom the last time I was down there, in fact. PM: Right. And I happened to be out of town, or I would have been at that bar passing the guitar around with you. LW: Yeah, that was a fun night. PM: So I may be privy, just for background’s sake, of course, to various anecdotes of considerable vintage. 2 LW: Okay. But I know that Tom wouldn’t have spilled all the beans. PM: No, no. He ain’t like that. So on the new record, I thought that the sequencing alone was masterful. Who’s responsible for that? LW: Well, Stewart Lerman and I produced the record. Stewart was the producer on my last record, Last Man on Earth. PM: Right. LW: And we just spent a lot of hours going through a lot of stuff trying to find the sequence, where the pieces of the puzzle fit. And he’s a good guy to bounce off of. So I’d have to say that he and I did it. PM: I mean, not only was it exquisitely layered between the serious and the humorous songs, but ending with “The Home Stretch” and “Men,” oh, that was really something. I ended up with my head shaking slowly in my hands. LW: Yeah, it’s a strong ending, I think. And after all these years of making these things—records or CDs, whatever you want to call them—I think sequencing is quite important. I know that now, of course, you can shuffle songs on a CD, and now you can buy just one song. But I’m of the old school, and that is that there’s a little journey that takes place for that hour. And so sequencing is very important. PM: That’s a good point. Although I might, if I’m making a mix CD, as they call it, just pull a song or two off somebody’s record, it wouldn’t occur to me to record a whole CD and change the order of the songs as they happen. Because for those of us who make records, it’s like, hey, we actually put a little thought into that sequence. LW: Yeah, definitely. PM: As life goes, would you call this a reasonably rosy period for you? LW: Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think it is a good time. One of the reasons the record that I made, Last Man on Earth, had a kind of serious tone to it, let’s say— PM: For good reason. [It was made after his mother passed away.] LW: Yeah, for very good reasons—serious and hopefully not dour. But this record, one of the reasons that we wanted to call it So Damn Happy, aside from the fact that there’s a tune on the album with that title, was that we wanted to herald that it’s lighter in tone. And there are some serious songs in it—you mentioned “Men,” and there are a couple of other ones too—but there’s some completely silly stuff, too, which I certainly hopefully never will forego entirely. PM: Definitely not. LW: So yeah, it’s a good time, and a lighter time, and I’m doing fine. PM: It would have been really cool if Undeclared was a big hit, but hey, it got somewhere. And there are good films coming up. 3 LW: Yeah. I just got an email, actually, from my agent, my theatrical agent. He told me that the buzz on the new Tim Burton movie, which I participated in this Spring, is very good. So hopefully, when Big Fish—which is the name of that flick—comes out—I think it’s slated for Christmastime—I’ll become a massive major motion picture star in addition to being a folk legend. [laughter] PM: One can only hope. And that’s an amazing thing. What’s your role in Big Fish, and what’s the film about? LW: Well, I’m kind of the mayor of this town called Specter, Alabama. Specter as in a haunting specter. PM: Right. LW: It’s a very strange town where people have an almost Village of the Damned/Stepford Wives vibe—but not as menacing. This movie is—I haven’t seen it, of course, cut together, but it feels—speaking of lighter in tone—it’s certainly lighter in tone than Planet of the Apes.