Wainwright’s new music takes inspiration from turning 75

By DAVID BAUDER
AP Entertainment Writer

NEW YORK (AP) — Singer Loudon Wainwright III has been writing about aging before he had any real concept of what that meant. Now he’s turned 75, and the songwriter’s first collection of new compositions in eight years is loosely themed on hitting that milestone and the wisdom the years offer. Of course, the man Rolling Stone magazine once called the “poet laureate of family dysfunction” can’t resist writing about family, too. He does so most prominently in a laugh-out-loud funny song about a man who craves a vacation from, not with, his family. The folk patriarch, looking back on a half-century of making music, says “it’s been great.”