(Taken from “My Cool Life: the Singer-Songwriter as Autobiographer” by Loudon Wainwright III)

Unaccustomed as I am to public speaking, I’ve been a singer-songwriter for 35 years. I get paid to stand up in front of people, play the guitar, and sing songs to them that I write. When I saw Bob Dylan at the Newport Folk Festival in 1963 there was a whole lotta identification going on. Here was a guy just a few years older than I was, writing and singing about what was going on in the world, his and mine. These were the heady days of "Blowin’ In The Wind" and "The Times They Are A’ Changing," when there were social issues to sing about, and apostrophes in song titles.

So what’s the big rule about writing? Write what you know about? When I started writing songs in 1968 I didn’t know about much. Raised in an affluent suburb of New York City, I’d gone to a boy’s boarding school, dropped out of college, been busted for pot, and had survived two or three disastrous puppy-love affairs. I’d mowed a few lawns and hitchhiked to New Canaan, Connecticut, but hadn’t harvested a single bail of cotton nor ridden any rails. Still, I somehow managed to write two or three songs per week, drawn from my pathetic dearth of experience. To cope with coffee house stage fright, in performance I physicalized my fear into strange, spastic body gyrations, replete with leg lifts, facial grimaces, and lots of tongue-wagging. I made sure people noticed me and, within a year, Atlantic Records had. My first two albums were positively retro, unadorned, without a trace of the drums, bass, and tasteful pedal steel guitar lickage that was going around at the time. My instincts paid off as the critics, always looking for the next new thing, and desperate then to fill the Dylan vacuum (Bob was out of commission at that time, holed up in Woodstock, recovering from a motorcycle accident), decided I was, to shamelessly quote one hyperbolic hack, "A blinding new talent." All my work on packaging had paid off. I’d been noticed. The songs I had written were also very good. That helped.

Gory details and spilt beans aside, writing about yourself, for yourself, doesn’t necessarily pay well. In 1972 after making two critically acclaimed but largely unpurchased LPs (long-playing vinyl recordings for you young folk) Atlantic’s crush on me was over and I was dropped. I was then picked up (yet another weird term, this one connotative of prostitution) by Columbia Records. On my third record, imaginatively entitled "Album III," there were more ‘songs of inexperience’ and autobiographical angst, but also a novelty tune I made up in 12 minutes about a dead skunk I ran over while driving in northern Westchester County, NewYork. Good instincts (get it?), great karma, dumb luck, plus plain old payola, all combined, and the result was my only hit heretofore and thus far, #12 on the Billboard Chart and #1 in Little Rock, Arkansas for six weeks. Suddenly I did have a pretty cool life. I was the "Dead Skunk" guy.

25 years old and I pretty much had made it. The critics’ darling was now a success. So what happened? Why is it that many of you here today aren’t quite sure who the hell I actually am, aside from Rufus Wainwright’s father? Why is finding a CD of mine akin to archeology? Where were the follow up hits to "Dead Skunk," funny animal songs like "I Met Her at the Pet Store" and "Stay Away From My Aardvark?" There are answers to these questions, reasons for the "what," the "whys," and the "where." Indeed, I could hold forth for hours this afternoon on the subject of my career. Over the years I’ve done just that for any number of psychotherapists. But we don’t have enough time today and I have trust issues with strangers who congregate in groups on college campuses. Besides, this talk is about writing and not my self-destructive tendencies. (But if you’re interested in charting the molehills and valleys of my career, it’s all been chronicled in song. Hey kids, fire up those mp3s and check out "Fame & Wealth," "A.M. World," "The Grammy Song," "Mr. Ambivalent," and "They Spelled My Name Wrong Again!")

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