Flak Magazine: Rufus and Loudon Wainwright, 10.07.03

Rufus is the son; Loudon, the father. Loudon found himself bemused (and a bit jealous) when he saw how vigorously his baby Rufus took to mother's milk and wrote a song about it. Rufus had an argument with his father after a photo shoot in the late '90s and wrote a song about it. Beyond that, we don't know a hell of a lot about their relationship, and if you're a fan of music without the attendant carnival of back story, music that emerges with a semblance of mystery, whose composers are somewhat anonymous, then this is good. Not that Rufus and Loudon aren't inclined to reveal themselves to the press now and again; it's the way they do it that confuses. Their public revelations, in print and on vinyl, are steeped with intimate, painful details that tend to illuminate and obscure their private selves in the same breath.

Loudon, 57, loads his songs with biographical material, but to his daughter on their duet "Father/Daughter Dialogue," he confesses, "The guy singing the songs ain't me." Rufus, 30, can be remarkably indiscreet, but then he pulls back, and you doubt his sincerity — as with his recent backpedaling on his drug use. Both men, for all their forthrightness, keep their complicated aspects a secret. Behind Loudon's arched eyebrow, even as he weaves his stories of family conflict, aging, and confusion about what it means to be a man, and buried in the bombast of Rufus' orchestrations (his mother, folk singer Kate McGarrigle, describes his songs as, "somewhere over the top"), you feel a rage, a loneliness, a hoping against hope, that both men cannot, or will not, articulate. It's what gives their music tension and immediacy, and it's what saves their latest albums, Rufus' Want One, and Loudon's live album, So Damn Happy!, from being perfunctory.

Loudon Wainwright III So Damn Happy! — Loudon's first album for the Sanctuary label — is chiefly a solo venture. The sometime actor is in his element onstage, communicating his pet peeves, his problems with relationships, and his upbringing, mainly with a single guitar and great warmth. He's in fine voice, and his readings of "So Damn Happy" and "Dreaming" surpass the studio versions. "Cobwebs," his musical protest of the misuse of the word "like," actually gains from him forgetting the lyrics — chalk it up to Loudon's ability to engage an audience. There are five new songs on the album. On "The Shit Song," a humorous look at the effects of aging, Loudon sings, "The guy who's me that's in my dreams is 25 or 6/ I'm old enough to be his dad/ How's that for parlor tricks?" He takes a stand against online piracy in "Something for Nothing," noting sardonically, "In love, war, and cyberspace, everything's fair/ And it's all right to steal, 'cause it's so nice to share." All the songs are fine and well sequenced, alternating between earnestness and cheekiness, and Loudon live is better than in the studio. So Damn Happy! is a good introduction to Loudon Wainwright III.

What Loudon's music lacks is heft. His confessional songs are, in many ways, as light as his comedy songs: They don't connect the listener to a universal idea. It's like sitting next to Loudon in his kitchen while he complains about file sharing and bitches about a woman who done him wrong and, at a quarter to two, confesses that he doesn't know how to love. It's honest, sometimes painfully so, but so is really sharp stand-up comedy, which is forgotten quickly. It's not necessary the way the unforgettable Richard Pryor seemed necessary.

Rufus, conversely, is all about heft. He's made it plain that he wants a place next to his idol, Giuseppe Verdi, in the musical pantheon. He wants to pick up where the Tin Pan Alley composers, Irving Berlin and Stephen Foster left off. His music is all about power and bravado — sweeping orchestrations and multi-part harmonies that are dazzling and intricate. His ear for melody is phenomenal, and his voice, a bit broken and wounded as he strives to sound glorious and operatic, is an asset. The wear and tear adds expressiveness, like Neil Young's voice. Listen to "Beauty Mark," on his debut album; the melody jumps from octave to octave restlessly, like ringlets of smoke from the cigarette at the end of an ivory holder. Rufus' sense of event in music is unmatched.

Want One, the first of a two-parter Rufus recorded with producer Marius de Vries, proves to be the least of his efforts. Rufus and de Vries, who has done florid work with Björk and Baz Luhrmann, strive mightily to give each song a distinctive sound, sometimes layering the instrumental and vocal tracks brick-by-brick, as if erecting a tower, sometimes pulling back and allowing Rufus to croon at a solitary piano. Some of the melodies captivate at once; "Go or Go Ahead" is breathtaking, beginning in a hush with acoustic guitar, as Rufus sings (so he says) about facing his addictions. The lyrics are a mess of metaphor, but what does it matter when the song blossoms in the chorus, and myriad voices and electric guitars wail in ecstasy? "14th Street," a song addressed to a man with "my lost brother's soul/ My dear mother's eyes/ A brown horse's mane/ And my uncle's name," is a buoyant music hall number and closes with a haphazardly overdubbed banjo round, courtesy of Rufus' mother.

Want One matches the eclecticism of Poses and his eponymous debut, but suffers from a lack of memorable songs. There's an audible straining on the part of the songwriter, and many tracks measure up neither to Rufus' past work nor the production flourishes they're given. His lyrics have moved from literate romanticism into murk. Instead of "California, California, you're such a wonder that I think I'll stay in bed," we get, "Nowhere's now here smelling of junipers/ Fell off the hay bales, I'm over the rainbow." It's no crime to write impenetrable lyrics — and Rufus is more comfortable communicating his anguish and yearning through thunderous orchestrations (such as the fantastic play on Ravel's "Bolero" in the opening track, "Oh What A World") than linear thought. There's no doubt that Rufus is capable of making great music, like his hero Verdi, into his 80s; simply put, this is his Il Corsaro, not his Falstaff.

Rufus' announcement that Want Two will arrive next spring is heartening. If you intend to claim a place alongside Stephen Foster in the family of American songwriters, it helps to have a song library of some size. Loudon Wainwright III-size, say. (Loudon has recorded 20 albums since 1968, when he began writing his own songs.) Perhaps that's what Rufus is alluding to when, in the track "Want," he sings, "I just want to be my dad/ With a slight sprinkling of my mother." Or he might mean something else. We'll never know, anyway: it's between father and son.

— Christopher Hickman (hickatz at mindspring dot com)