Loudon Wainwright III “wrings more human truth out of his contradiction than any other songwriter of his generation,” says the New York Times. What is his contradiction? The one between thinking and feeling, between living and dying, between red wine and white? “And if families didn't break apart / I supposed there'd be no need for art,” he sings in his song “In C.” Whatever the contradiction, he’s been working it out onstage at the Freight since the late 1960s, and he’s still going strong. He won a Grammy in 2010 for Best Traditional Folk Album with High Wide & Handsome: The Charlie Poole Project, and his 22nd and latest album, Older Than My Old Man Now, was named to NPR’s Top Ten Albums of 2012. “The songs signify individually and sequentially as they ponder mortality and poke jokily at old age,” says famed critic Robert Christgau. Mojo Magazine calls it “lyrically compelling and emotionally overpowering.”
 
Loudon was born in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. His father, Loudon Wainwright, Jr., was a well-known columnist and editor for Life Magazine. He had an early hit with “Dead Skunk in the Middle of the Road” and the songs have kept on coming, covered by such artists as Johnny Cash, Bonnie Raitt, Earl Scruggs, Mose Allison, Big Star, and Freakwater. He branched into acting early in his career, and has appeared on such television shows as MASH and Parks & Recreation, and such movies as The 40 Year Old Virgin and Knocked Up. He recently debuted a new theatrical piece, Surviving Twin, which connects his music with the writing of his late father, and appears as an eccentric Theremin player in the film Pleased To Meet Me, also starring Aimee Mann, John Doe, and Joe Henry. Loudon was married to Kate McGarrigle and Suzzy Roche, and is the father of musicians Rufus and Martha Wainwright, and Lucy Wainwright Roche. He’s a social critic, a self critic, a superb singer and songwriter, and a wildly entertaining performer who balances honesty and emotion with the quirky contradiction of being Loudon Wainwright III.

Lucy Wainwright Roche has a great new album, There’s a Last Time for Everything. “The vibe here is dreamy, intimate,” says the website AllMusic.com, praising the “quiet, tender song settings.” And that’s what the audience gets with Lucy, along with her charming stage presence and crystalline vocals: songs that are honest and tender, dreamy and intimate, loaded with emotion and refreshingly straightforward. She’s performed at the Freight often, both headlining and sharing the bill with her mother, Suzzy Roche, but this is the first time she’s shared the bill with her father. The BBC, in a review of her 2007 debut album, Lucy, said that “she’s clearly inherited her father’s way with words and her mother’s quirky nonchalance,” but that instead of the family’s “extravagant flamboyance,” she adopts “a rather more coy, introspective, and wholly less brazen approach both in song and delivery.” In other words, she does it her way, performing her lovely originals with great heart and soul.

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