Review: Loudon Wainwright III Delivers a Warts and All Autobiography on ‘Years in the Making’

The singer-songwriter’s career-spanning new set shows why there’s never been a confessional sage quite like him.

3.5 Stars

As he reminds us album after album, decade after decade, few songwriters have laid out their lives in song as graphically as Loudon Wainwright III. By chronicling his years from post-adolescence to senior citizenry in real time, he’s not only pushed the boundaries of confessional songwriting but allowed those with somewhat more stable lives to live vicariously through his trysts, marriages, divorces, inebriated episodes, quest for success, and bad-dad issues. Pick any point in your life—the arrival of a child, the loss of a parent or two, the amassing of new meds in the bathroom cabinet–and Wainwright will have a song about it. It’s hard to imagine an even deeper dive into his world, but he does that just with this “audiobiography”–two discs of home recordings, low-fi live tapes, album rejects, and other ephemera from an unapologetic narcissist and screwup who still manages to speak direct, universal truths like no one else in his business.

Arranged by topic and rough chronology, Years in the Making starts with “Folk,” where at various points in his life we hear Wainwright singing Dylan and Woody Guthrie. Just as revealingly, he mangles the cringe-worthy folk ballad “I Gave My Love a Cherry,” which devolves into faxed death threats. (It’s the lyrical equivalent of John Belushi smashing Stephen Bishop’s guitar in Animal House.) The grouping of tracks into the section “Rocking Out” almost comically documents the period in the ’70s when the normally one-man-act Wainwright had backing bands and tried to make something akin to commercial pop. A live take of “2 Song Set” now sounds like a glorious-loser country song, and its drunk-at-the-bar “flash in the pan” narrator feels even more pointed in retrospect. (Wainwright’s only hit, “Dead Skunk,” came a few years earlier.) But when he starts a live version of “You Hurt Me Mantra” with an almost uncomfortable parody of a heckler, you can hear why he wasn’t destined for AM radio that often.

Read the full review HERE.