June 2022

June 1, 2022

Loudon Wainwright III to Release 31st Studio Album Lifetime Achievement

Loudon Wainwright III has announced his new album Lifetime Achievement, to be released August 19 on StorySound Records.  His first album of new original songs since 2014’s Haven’t Got The Blues Yet, Lifetime Achievement finds LWIII in a state of deep reflection at age 75, over a set of 15 recently written, insightful and incisive gems that he wasn’t even planning to pen.

Says Wainwright, “I remember when I made my first record for Atlantic in 1969. I was always saying, 'I want it to be a record – not only a recording, but a document that captures a moment.' I was 21 and very serious, and I thought I'd be dead in four years (laughs). So I wanted to make something that would last. A testament. Now, fifty years later, I guess I still want to make a testament. I want to write a group of songs and get them down in the best possible way. And I like to think they might last a while.”

Album highlights include “Town & Country” which finds Wainwright returning to his beloved Gotham after an extended stay in the country; thrilling to the round-the-clock wailing of sirens, the masked masses, and uninvited dinner guests of the rodent variety. Over a soulful groove and a hot band, he frames the “city vs. country” argument in his own inimitable style.  “Fam Vac,” a song about family vacations and the lived experience of Jean Paul Sartre’s famous observation that: “Hell is other people.”  Following a recurring theme, the song “Hell” imagines a baseball diamond full of dictators.  While Wainwright’s masterful wit and humor is on full contemplative display, so is his lump-in-the-throat tenderness, as on the a capella “One Wish.”     

While many tracks are stripped down with just Wainwright and a guitar or light accompaniment, others are seasoned with horns, strings, lap steel and electric guitar work, featuring many of his frequent collaborators: Chaim Tannenbaum (vocals, banjo, harmonica), David Mansfield (violin, viola, mandolin, 12-string guitar, Weissenborn guitar, pedal steel), Tony Scherr (guitar and bass), Rich Pagano (drums, percussion), Jon Cowherd (Wurlitzer, organ), and others including a string arrangement by Rob Moose. It was recorded with two of his longtime producers, Dick Connette and Stewart Lerman.

After thirty albums, a Grammy, many film and TV credits, and songs recorded by such artists as Johnny Cash, Mose Allison, Bonnie Raitt and his son Rufus, Wainwright is perhaps our foremost six-string analyst and tragicomedian. And with Lifetime Achievement his “unmatched wit and wisdom” (NPR) has never been on sharper display. 

June 2, 2022

PREMIERE: ‘Covid-Pop’ Is a New Genre, and Loudon Wainwright III Brings the Latest Addition

In his new track “Town & Country,” the acerbic troubadour chronicles the thrill of returning to the big city after lockdown–and the fun and dangers that await anyone there.

By David Browne

Say this about the pandemic: There are now enough songs about Covid-19 to make for a pretty eclectic playlist. The track lineup would include T Turbo, Gunna and Young Thug’s chilled-out “Quarantine Clean,” Luke Combs’ forlorn “Six Feet Apart,” and Twenty One Pilots’ kitschy, almost romantic “Level of Concern.” If nothing else, the virus has found common ground between genres that otherwise would have barely much in common.

The next to land is “Town & Country” by longtime singer-songwriter Loudon Wainwright III, veteran observer of his and everyday life as well as patriarch of a musical family that’s given us Rufus, Martha and Lucy. “Town & Country” brings yet another perspective to pandemic pop. Hunkered down most of the last two years on Long Island, Wainwright chronicles his return to New York City and the thrill of encountering renewed life there (at least, to whatever degree that still exists): Sirens! Drunks on the subway! “Behind those masks there’s all those faces,” he sings, “I’m so excited seeing parking spaces.”

Shying away from Wainwright’s often acoustic approach, “Town & Country” is set to a rousing arrangement featuring horns and even guitar and organ solos. You can almost feel the city come back to life in the music. As Wainwright sings, “My dear mother was afraid of the city/She said, ‘Don’t go there Loudie, it’s shady and its shitty’/She was raised in the country, what could that poor woman know?”

But as anyone who’s dined in one of those temporary outdoor restaurant sheds knows all too well, humans aren’t the only creatures lurking in those constructions. And sure enough, Wainwright encounters one of those smaller creatures — “a rat as big as a cat” — underneath the table, and back to the country he goes. With “Town & Country” — part of Wainwright’s forthcoming Lifetime Achievement album, due in August — we can add “sardonic folk” to the pandemic top 40.

WATCH "Town & Country"

Read the Full Rolling Stone Article HERE

June 2, 2022

Loudon Wainwright III Comes Back for More With New Album of Original Songs

At age 75 and with 30 albums to his name, singer-songwriter Loudon Wainwright III could just call it a career — and he kind of thought he had.

But on his birthday last year he thought, “75 is a big number,” and decided he still has more to say. That statement on aging, the state of the world, and much more is coming to our ears on Aug. 19 in the form of his 31st album, Lifetime Achievement, via StorySound Records.

The album’s 15 songs kind of snuck up on him in recent years, according to a press release, and come from a man who found that he still has a little more legacy to leave.

“I remember when I made my first record for Atlantic in 1969. I was always saying, ‘I want it to be a record — not only a recording, but a document that captures a moment.’ I was 21 and very serious, and I thought I’d be dead in four years,” Wainwright says in the announcement. “So I wanted to make something that would last. A testament. Now, fifty years later, I guess I still want to make a testament. I want to write a group of songs and get them down in the best possible way. And I like to think they might last a while.”

The first single from Lifetime Achievement is “Town & Country,” about Wainwright’s return to pandemic-era New York after spending time in the country. With his signature wit, he sings the praises of his city even as he pokes at its flaws.

READ the Article.