Come in, Loudon

On his new Grown Man (Virgin), Wainwright's dead-on joke song is "I Wish I Was a Lesbian," beating the "Dead Skunk" composition time by seven minutes, and it's a hoot. The biggest joke, of course, is that a man is singing a woman's role, firing out wisecrack couplets, speaking with a woman's disgust for men's perfidy, matching every male offense with a same-sex delight, scoring his biggest laugh with a rhyme of "well hung" and "tongue" (think about it).

There's also plenty here in Wainwright's typically self-lacerating confessional mode, including the title song and a stunning duet with his 19-year-old daughter, Martha ("Father/Daughter Dialogue"). There's also broad social satire: a jazzy screed on the ubiquitous interjection "like" ("Cobwebs") and a damning calypso on biological determinism ("1994"). Of the more narrative-based pieces, "That Hospital" is a standout -- a friend's car wreck remembered from youth, his father's illness, a spouse who checks in for an abortion, the birth of a child. Only at the end of the song do you realize that these thoughts have come as Wainwright sits by his mother's sickbed. It's just another incident that manages to take in a lifetime of experience.

In a phone interview from New York recently, Wainwright was fairly self-effacing about his work methods. Although not always as fast as on "Dead Skunk" or "Lesbian," he generally works quickly. The real shaping of songs come in performance. "Tempo is really important for me. `Grown Man' took a long time to figure out in terms of tempo. It also modulates once -- jumps into another key and jumps back -- which is something that I hardly ever do. By performing it, we've figured out how it should go."

Wainwright depends specifically on audience reaction. "In a lot of songs it's important that I get a laugh. If I intend to get a laugh and if I don't get it, then something's wrong. Sometimes you get a laugh where you don't expect it, and that's always fun and never disappointing. People can be nervous and their response is laughter -- it's not just people being amused. Laughing is a way of dealing with different situations, and discomfort is one of them. On `That Hospital' there's a reference to an abortion. There's usually some kind of reaction and quite often it will be a laugh, but it's kind of a choked laugh. It's the reaction that I want. I want it to be jarring and make the audience a bit uncomfortable."

One of the most affecting songs on the album is "Father/Daughter Dialogue." "Dearest Daddy with your songs/Do you hope to right your wrongs?" sings Martha Wainwright, enumerating her father's evasions. To which Wainwright offers another: songs are art, not real life, and "the guy singing the songs ain't me." Even though Wainwright has written the words his daughter sings, and given himself the last word, he says in his notes to the album: "The moral of the story is . . . that even though you get the last licks, you don't necessarily win." With Wainwright's own daughter singing her dialogue, the art-versus-life irony is compounded. The song is slyly even-handed.

"She had the stronger argument," he explains. "When I say I'm not the guy writing these songs, that's me squirming on a hook. On the other hand, I know what I meant at the time. As personal as these songs are -- as much as I write about parents, wives, children, lovers -- this job of writing songs, making CDs, and doing shows comes down to a craft. It's a show. It's enhanced or souped up. My version of events quite often is true, but there has to be a beginning, a middle, and an end. Her answer was that this argument was too pat, too facile. I might say that this is a version of me, not the real me, but that doesn't solve her problem, which is that I'm not around, and when I am, I'm uptight. Her argument is air-tight."

And how does Wainwright find his exquisite rhymes for this intensely personal material? "When it's going well, things come easily, you don't labor too much about what rhymes with what. It's like a jigsaw puzzle where you just start finding pieces. It's when you're sitting there thinking about what rhymes with `chair' -- then you know it might be time to stop."