 Last Man On Earth – Loudon Wainwright IIILoudon Wainwright introduced himself to me in the spring of 1998 at the South by Southwest Festival in Austin, Texas. He had recognized me from a photo from the first Last Forever CD booklet, and, as he put it (somewhat) delicately, I was an unusual-looking person. Well, as it happened, I was living in New York, and he was living just outside, and we started hanging out. He had recently lost his mother, and was going though a bad patch, and around that time once told me that he didn’t know if he’d ever write another song. Of course he did, and Last Man On Earth was, to a considerable extent, a musical coming to terms with not only the death of his mother and father, but also a grappling with his own mortality. That might sound grim, but Loudon found a sweetness in the sorrow, often lightly cloaked in his characteristically rueful humor. I worked on the arrangements for many of the songs – the trick was not to lose the expressive clarity of his vocal/guitar versions. The producer Stewart Lerman and I, and even Loudon, sometimes, used to joke that if he got hit by a bus, we could always put out his demos. I gotta say, I’m glad he didn’t, and that I got to be a part of this wonderful CD.Last Man On Earth (9/25/01) is available for purchase and download at Amazon and for download from iTunes. Loudon’s got his own website and a page on MySpace. |
