Words matter. These are the best Loudon Wainwright III Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
If I had five minutes to live, I don’t think I’d be bothered singing a song. I’d be dead, so it won’t really matter. I’d have a glass of wine and a cigarette.
I don’t think of myself as a folk singer per se, but I really like blues and string-band music. When I started listening to records when I was a teenager, the folk boom was going on.
I was a smoker for years. Occasionally I slip and have a cigarette. Remarkably, my voice has held up. I’m grateful, obviously. But I don’t gargle with honey and ground-up bird eggs. I have no secrets.
When you start performing, you realize that you have to separate yourself from the pack. So I would never wear bell-bottoms, which everybody else was wearing. I had short hair – and to see a 21-year-old guy walk onstage without longish hair was, in itself, weird. Every entertainer needs a shtick.
If you’re 28 and singing about being over the hill, you’re pretending. When you’re 67 and singing about it, you know what you’re talking about.
I wasn’t in a lot of rock and roll bands. I was in jug bands and things when I was in school.
I’ve been writing about growing old for some time, really from the beginning of my career. It’s something I’m apparently hung up about and now that I am old, hopefully I speak about it with some authority.
I have travelled and been pretty much a one man operation for most of my career, and I think it’ll continue to be that way.
I’ve never really suffered complete and utter writer’s block, really. I equate it with sex: in the beginning of my career, I was writing five songs a week; now, I occasionally write a song. But it’s an exciting moment when it happens!
When my mother died, and when my father died, it’s big. Our parents are giants; they’re titans of our lives, so of course it’s going to be a big deal.
You always want to break away from your parents, and you always think, ‘I’m never going to be like that guy.’ What I’ve discovered is you kind of wind up becoming your parents, which is also a cliche in itself. My father, despite the fact that he’s been dead for over 25 years, he’s been a huge influence on me.
It’s nice when people say, ‘God, I’ve been listening to you since 1963 or 1985, or whatever.’ I appreciate anybody who goes out and buys music these days.
My music comes from country music. Merle Haggard is God, and I do believe that. I’m not too tuned in to country music. I don’t know who Brooks and Dunn are. I like Shania Twain, though!
When a parent dies, the whole house of cards comes down.
When you make a record, you listen to it literally hundreds of times. When it’s done and you can’t do anything else, I never listen to my records.
When you start your career, you have to figure out a way to separate yourself from the pack. So I went for a kind of preppy, psycho-killer look: I had short hair, grey flannel pants, and a button-down shirt. I think it worked, because nobody else was looking that way at that time.
I think I’m great. I mean, I might as well come out and say it. Like most people, I have an ego and I’m in show business, so you have to have kind of a healthy, conflagrated ego to a degree. On the other hand, I’m consumed, like a lot of people, with self-doubt and loathing and guilt.
Family life is tough, I’ll say that for it. But in my case, I’ve mined the family. In a sense, I’ve used it. I’ve used what happened – the different events, the births of children, birthdays. Connecting, not connecting. Regret, shame, guilt. I mean, they’re all in the songs. And love, too, I hasten to add.
I guess I can be surprised I’m alive. I’m taking a little better care of myself than when I was a young person. My father died when he was 63. My mother made it to 74. My grandparents, God, they were dropping like flies.
