When the novelty song “Dead Skunk” became his first hit in the early 1970s - his only hit, really - that briefly became a trap. ![]() I decided I can do both and I have done both.” I'm goofing on it now, but I can do very serious songs. “I can do funny, and I can do really down and depressing. “I think of myself as a switch-hitter,” he said. At the same time, the way he sang of feeling adrift following the death of his mother in 2001's “Homeless” is chilling in its naked emotion. The new “Fam Vac” is laugh-out-loud funny: the narrator wants a vacation from, not with, his family. Over the course of 15 songs, Wainwright sings about pieces of his life scattered in various locales, walking through an old lover's town, imagining himself at the gates of hell and the perspective of a dog caught in the middle of a divorce. “But actually, it really applies to me now.” “The aging thing has always been on all of my records,” he said. Three-quarters of a century is a milestone, not just because it's a big number, but because he's now lived longer than his father and mother. I'll hear the fat lady,” is one of Wainwright's signature mixes of humor and poignant observation. The new song “How Old is 75?,” where he sings, “in five years I'll be 80. So it's no stretch that the folk singer's first album of new compositions in eight years, “Lifetime Achievement,” is loosely based on turning 75. NEW YORK - Loudon Wainwright III points out that the first line of the first song on his first album, released when he was 23, is about aging: “In Delaware when I was younger.”
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