Liner Notes

August 1, 2017
The veteran singer/songwriter delivers a memoir as "album liner notes; something extra, informative, and interesting."Fans of the self-lacerating, painfully funny Wainwright III will find the memoir they want here. As he writes of his club performances, "often the response I'm going for is a shiver or a cringe. Making an audience uncomfortable for limited amounts of time ratchets up the dramatic tension." Though he remains perhaps best known for the novelty hit "Dead Skunk," he remains better loved for material that cuts uncomfortably close to the bone of family dynamics, of his failings as a husband and a father, of his jealousies and rivalries in relationships with his own father (a well-known columnist for Life at its popular peak) and son, Rufus Wainwright, a musical artist who now has a larger and more rapturous following than his father. With a wit that can draw blood and a confessional openness that knows few limits, the author guides readers through his parents' loveless marriage, his sibling rivalries, his tempestuous marriages and relationships, the tensions of an absentee father, his deeply ambivalent attitude toward success and stardom, and his depressive insecurities. "When I'm not thinking of myself as the greatest singer-songwriter who ever lived," he writes, "I consider myself to be a talentless fraud." Many of the chapters provide fuller context for his autobiographical lyrics, while others reprint some of his favorite columns of his father's. Wainwright compares himself to those who were "stars in the music business, whereas I was merely a puny asteroid relegated to the far periphery of the rock and roll galaxy." Yet those who have followed his career for decades--"Loud Heads," he calls them--will delight in how much more they can learn about a songwriter who has already revealed so much in his material. A very funny and candid memoir, in an occasionally cringeworthy sort of way.

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September 1, 2017
This amiable memoir is as fractured and meandering as any Loudon Wainwright III recording. Singer-songwriter and occasional actor Wainwright is as famous for his family connections as the former husband of singers Kate McGarrigle and Suzzy Roche and the father of Rufus Wainwright as for his music, but his fans, known as Loud Heads, are a loyal and devoted bunch. This self-described Westchester WASP writes about his privileged upbringing. His well-known journalist father grew up, he says, in Great Gatsby country on the gold coast of Long Island, but he also writes about his father's alcohol-fueled rage. He notes that he's written many songs about drinking and writes about meeting McGarrigle in 1968 at the Gaslight in Greenwich Village and of their less than stellar marriage, admitting, I was a lousy husband. One of the funniest anecdotes is about his stint playing an FBI agent in Mission: Impossible, in which he had all of one line, which was cut from the final film. Classic Wainwright.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)

April 1, 2017

Grammy Award-winning singer and actor Wainwright tells us what it's like to be not only a famous performer but also the son of a famous journalist, former husband of Kate McGarrigle and Suzzy Roche, and father of performers Rufus Wainwright, Martha Wainwright, Lucy Wainwright Roche, and Lexie Kelly Wainwright.

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