Loudon Wainwright III has announced the release of Lifetime Achievement. While his most recent album, I’d Rather Lead a Band, found him dipping into American Songbook selections near and dear to his personal history, this is his first album of new original songs since 2014’s Haven’t Got The Blues Yet. As noted in that album review, for over 40 Odd Years, Loudon Wainwright III has stuck to his guns and remained true to his muse.
On this latest offering, we find him in a state of deep reflection at age 75, over a set of 15 recently written, insightful and incisive gems that he wasn’t even planning to pen.
Says Wainwright, “I remember when I made my first record for Atlantic in 1969. I was always saying, ‘I want it to be a record – not only a recording, but a document that captures a moment.’ I was 21 and very serious, and I thought I’d be dead in four years (laughs). So I wanted to make something that would last. A testament. Now, fifty years later, I guess I still want to make a testament. I want to write a group of songs and get them down in the best possible way. And I like to think they might last a while.”
If his lead single Town & Country is a measure of what’s to come, then Lifetime Achievement promises another instalment of sophisticated savvy.
Town and Country finds him returning to his beloved Gotham after an extended stay in the country, thrilling to the round-the-clock wailing of sirens, the masked masses, and uninvited dinner guests of the rodent variety. Over a soulful groove and a hot band, he frames the “city vs. country” argument in his own inimitable style:
My dear mother was afraid of the city, she said don’t go there Loudie, it’s shady and it’s shitty; She was raised in the country, what could that poor woman know?
Father went to town, he was a working slob, getting into trouble was his other job;
There’s plenty of trouble in the city, that’s why folks go
The album is set to be released on August 19th on StorySound Records.
Pre-save Lifetime Achievement here: https://ffm.to/lifetimeachievement