Reviews

Loudon Wainwright III had hip replacement surgery last year, so naturally he wrote a song about it.

The unreleased "Hip" was part of his warm and witty solo show Friday at Sons of Hermann Hall. "Got a lot of death and decay songs," the one-time "new Bob Dylan" said by way of introduction. Boy, he wasn't kidding.

Mr. Wainwright has been writing autobiographically about life's passages for almost 40 years, like a Gail Sheehy with an acoustic guitar.

Using approaches from the tender to the wicked, he focused Friday on tunes with what he called "location themes." As much as establishing a sense of place, that meant searching for universal truths beneath the mundane.

The talking-folk-blues "Westchester County" essayed his country-club upbringing while "Primrose Hill" found him lonely in London: "I got my music and this dog for a friend."

But Mr. Wainwright is not one to wallow. He arrived with an upbeat attitude, gamely fielding requests from the appreciative audience without necessarily fulfilling them. And he laced even his most downbeat songs with cutting humor, including the sickly funny show-closer "The Man Who Couldn't Cry."

Then there were the outright laughers, such as "Date Line," a new number he thought up during a trip to Australia and New Zealand. It chronicles the absurdity of crossing the international demarcation of time when one day becomes the previous – or the next.

The early part of his 85-minute set was taken up mostly with darkly humorous songs from his latest album, Strange Weirdos, and newer gems, such as the one about gin and dying that might be called "High, Wide and Handsome."

Not to be pigeonholed, he also mixed in a few poignant tunes, such as "You Can't Fail Me Now" ("Mercy's just a warning shot across the bow"), the anti-war "Men" and "Hank and Fred," which name-drops both Hank Williams and Fred Rogers.

Now 61, Mr. Wainwright remains a vitally twisted songwriter and performer.

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