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The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Loudon Wainwright III Quotes

I know that people don’t listen to music much in the way when they’ll put on a CD, sit down, have a drink or go on a car journey. People pick and choose and just listen to tracks. But when I make a record, I try to think about it as a 50 minute musical journey, so the mood is very important, as is the sequence of the songs.

– Loudon Wainwright III

I have travelled and been pretty much a one man operation for most of my career, and I think it’ll continue to be that way.

– Loudon Wainwright III

If you’re 28 and singing about being over the hill, you’re pretending. When you’re 67 and singing about it, you know what you’re talking about.

– Loudon Wainwright III

When my mother died, and when my father died, it’s big. Our parents are giants; they’re titans of our lives, so of course it’s going to be a big deal.

– Loudon Wainwright III

I’m always asked if the songs that I write are therapeutic, and my answer is a quick no. In fact, it could be argued that they exacerbate my neurosis.

– Loudon Wainwright III

It’s nice when people say, ‘God, I’ve been listening to you since 1963 or 1985, or whatever.’ I appreciate anybody who goes out and buys music these days.

– Loudon Wainwright III

I don’t claim to be a particularly good father. I’m flawed, let’s say. I’ve certainly been affected by the experience of having kids… trying to be a father, at least. It’s an amazing process. It’s like songwriting: it’s a complete mystery to me. I don’t understand it – but I’ve certainly written about it.

– Loudon Wainwright III

I love failure. It’s stuff that I’m thinking about all the time in my life, so it would make sense to me anyway to write about it.

– Loudon Wainwright III

I don’t think of myself as a folk singer per se, but I really like blues and string-band music. When I started listening to records when I was a teenager, the folk boom was going on.

– Loudon Wainwright III

When you start performing, you realize that you have to separate yourself from the pack. So I would never wear bell-bottoms, which everybody else was wearing. I had short hair – and to see a 21-year-old guy walk onstage without longish hair was, in itself, weird. Every entertainer needs a shtick.

– Loudon Wainwright III

I don’t write about anything I don’t want to write about. I like to think I could write about anything pretty much that I chose to. I have been asked to write songs about specific things, and I’ve always been able to come up with the goods.

– Loudon Wainwright III

I’ve been writing about growing old for some time, really from the beginning of my career. It’s something I’m apparently hung up about and now that I am old, hopefully I speak about it with some authority.

– Loudon Wainwright III

Los Angeles, the sun shines a lot, and it’s blue, and there’s palm trees; it’s a bit like Sydney, I guess, but the underbelly is a vicious, mean, cruel, awful place.

– Loudon Wainwright III

If I had five minutes to live, I don’t think I’d be bothered singing a song. I’d be dead, so it won’t really matter. I’d have a glass of wine and a cigarette.

– Loudon Wainwright III

I had a hip replacement a couple of years ago. I have a song about that. And why wouldn’t you? It strikes me that that was a huge event. It’s kind of funny and horrible and interesting, so why wouldn’t one write about that?

– Loudon Wainwright III

I think I’m great. I mean, I might as well come out and say it. Like most people, I have an ego and I’m in show business, so you have to have kind of a healthy, conflagrated ego to a degree. On the other hand, I’m consumed, like a lot of people, with self-doubt and loathing and guilt.

– Loudon Wainwright III

When you have a song on the radio your career and your life changes maybe for the better and maybe for the not so good… depending on how it’s going that day.

– Loudon Wainwright III

The big things in the average person’s life are the romances that they have – and then the destruction and loss of them. Parents, siblings, children, the death of parents, family tension… these are monumental things. They struck me as being interesting to write about. I didn’t have a very exotic life, but all this stuff happened to me.

– Loudon Wainwright III

When you make a record, you listen to it literally hundreds of times. When it’s done and you can’t do anything else, I never listen to my records.

– Loudon Wainwright III

I think I’m the oldest new Bob Dylan around. I predate Bruce Springsteen, Steve Forbat and John Prine. I was probably the first of the new Bob Dylans.

– Loudon Wainwright III

I always wanted to be an actor, even as a little kid. So I went to drama school in the late ’60s at Carnegie Mellon.

– Loudon Wainwright III

My music comes from country music. Merle Haggard is God, and I do believe that. I’m not too tuned in to country music. I don’t know who Brooks and Dunn are. I like Shania Twain, though!

– Loudon Wainwright III

When a parent dies, the whole house of cards comes down.

– Loudon Wainwright III

Family life is tough, I’ll say that for it. But in my case, I’ve mined the family. In a sense, I’ve used it. I’ve used what happened – the different events, the births of children, birthdays. Connecting, not connecting. Regret, shame, guilt. I mean, they’re all in the songs. And love, too, I hasten to add.

– Loudon Wainwright III

I wasn’t in a lot of rock and roll bands. I was in jug bands and things when I was in school.

– Loudon Wainwright III

I guess I can be surprised I’m alive. I’m taking a little better care of myself than when I was a young person. My father died when he was 63. My mother made it to 74. My grandparents, God, they were dropping like flies.

– Loudon Wainwright III