Andrew Curry writes: I’d been listening to the McGarrigle’s luminiscent first LP, and that brought Loudon Wainwright III to mind, Kate McGarrigle’s-by-then ex-husband. He pops up on the record in two guises, as the writer of The Swimming Song and as the unnamed subject of Go Leave.
That took me on a bit of a daisychain to Loudon Wainwright’s work, and I alighted on his 1986 record More Love Songs.
It’s not a title to take at face value. Loudon Wainwright was almost always sardonic, and these are not love songs. In fact, quite a lot of these are break-up songs.
By this stage, although some of my chronology is a bit hazy here, my guess is that he’s partly writing about the aftermath of his relationship with Suzzy Roche, with whom he had a daughter in 1981 (the singer Lucy Wainwright Roche).
(Photo; Andrew Curry, CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)
And so there’s a song about the pathos of eating on your own in a restaurant, and another about trying to date a woman who turns out to be gay. Unhappy Anniversary is a song marking the one year anniversary of a separation, and Your Mother and I is a post-separation song to a child:
Your mother and I are living apart
I know that seems stupid, but we aren’t very smart.
Even the cover—the Holman Hunt painting The Awakening Conscience—shows a woman realising that she needs to get away from a man.
Pulling my vinyl copy off the shelves, I see that the record was recorded in London with an impressive cast of British musicians. Among many others, Richard Thompson plays guitar, and co-produced, Danny Thompson is on bass, and Dave Mattacks on drums. Martin Carthy and John Kirkpatrick were also in the studio, and Christine Collister and Maria Muldaur sing vocals.
Among the rest of the songs, The Back Nine uses golf, surprisingly effectively, as a metaphor for ageing.
Apart from the Caravan song, which is only incidentally about golf, it’s the only decent song I know that mentions the game. (That’s not surprising: golf’s not exactly rock ‘n’ roll.)
Wainwright was just approaching 40 when he recorded the album, and you might think, listening to it, that it was a bit of a mid-life crisis record. But I think you’d be wrong about this. He’s always worn his heart on his sleeve in his songs—on Loudon II, which he recorded when he was 25, there’s a pair of songs that starts with I Know I’m Unhappy and segues into Suicide Song.
And some of the songs on More Love Songsare just about being a long way away from home when on the road. That’s the case in The Home Stretch, about a musician having a bad night playing in a club that’s seen better days, in front of a disinterested audienve, far from home, a bit unmoored, and feeling that it’s all downhill from here:
If the day off doesn’t get you
The bad reviewer does
At least you’ve been a has-been
And not a never-was.
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