Loudon Wainwright III Quotes
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I love failure. It's stuff that I'm thinking about all the time in my life, so it would make sense to me anyway to write about it.
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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.
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Doomsday is quite within our reach, if we will only stretch for it.
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When a parent dies, the whole house of cards comes down.
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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 II'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. was a teenager, the folk boom was going on.
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I'm always asked if the songs that I write are therapeutic, and my answer is a quick no. In fact, it could be argued that they exacerbate my neurosis.
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It's hard for the modern generation to understand Thoreau, who lived beside a pond but didn't own water skis or a snorkel.
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After a war, after a concentration camp, I find it's not too difficult to be happy.
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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.
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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.
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I hated the idea that I would be like my father. Which is one of the reasons I decided I didn't want to be a writer and wanted to be an actor instead. I wanted to go in a total different direction. But, of course, I ended up being a writer anyway.
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My feeling is that, and I've been writing about my family over the years, although it might make them feel uncomfortable, people generally like to be written about. If I've written a song about the family, they enjoy being mentioned in the songs. Nobody's confronted me and said 'don't write any songs about me.
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I had a hip replacement a couple of years ago. I have a song about that. And why wouldn't you? It strikes me that that was a huge event. It's kind of funny and horrible and interesting, so why wouldn't one write about that?
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Los Angeles, the sun shines a lot, and it's blue, and there's palm trees; it's a bit like Sydney, I guess, but the underbelly is a vicious, mean, cruel, awful place.
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My father writings stuff was always his personal stuff, like about the day we had to put our dog down, or finding old photographs of his father, or passing a guy he went to boarding school with on a street in New York. Very specific, detailed, descriptive columns that he wrote. I think in a way, it could be argued that my best songs are that way too. They're almost journalistic in that they're very clear, and very specific, and they describe things.
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I don't claim to be a particularly good father. I'm flawed, let's say. I've certainly been affected by the experience of having kids... trying to be a father, at least. It's an amazing process. It's like songwriting: it's a complete mystery to me. I don't understand it - but I've certainly written about it.
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Geoff Muldaur was and is one of my musical heroes. When I listen to him sing and play, I can hear the coal mine, the cotton field, and last, but certainly foremost, the boy's boarding school.
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The big things in the average person's life are the romances that they have - and then the destruction and loss of them. Parents, siblings, children, the death of parents, family tension... these are monumental things. They struck me as being interesting to write about. I didn't have a very exotic life, but all this stuff happened to me.
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I don't write about anything I don't want to write about. I like to think I could write about anything pretty much that I chose to. I have been asked to write songs about specific things, and I've always been able to come up with the goods.
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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.
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Who was that fatman buried in your place? Just another imitator, plastic surgeons did his face.
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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.
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You just do the best you can. It doesn't necessarily mean that you have to get worse the more you do it. It can get better, I think... aspects of it, anyway. I mean, I don't write as much as I used to. But I don't do a lot of things as much as I used to. So that's the natural order of things, too. You're more or less living in the present. You're just trying to get that next song, whatever it is. And not think too much about what happened on the last record, or the record you made 20 years ago, because those are over with. Those are done.
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I studied acting and there's certainly an element of performance. I think that the songs are in many ways written to be performed. I think about what it's going to be like to sing them on stage rather than what it's going to be like to have someone at home listening to them on a CD. I guess in that way there's a connection between my acting experience and the songwriting and the way the songs are written.