The songs that the Wainwright family wrote about each other
By all accounts, the Wainwrights appear to be one of music’s more dysfunctional family units. Headed by 1970s folk singer-songwriter Loudon Wainwright III, the family also features Loudon’s sister Sloan and his three children: Martha, Rufus, and Lucy. Martha and Rufus’ mother was Canadian folk singer Kate McGarrigle, while Lucy’s mother is a fellow folkie, Suzzy Roche. All in all, it’s a very musical family.
Loudon had a habit of pulling inspiration from his everyday life and using it as a theme in his songs. That made him a remarkably relatable songwriter, but it also had the added effect of putting his family in the public eye without their consent or approval. Loudon wrote a number of songs about raising his children, including ‘Rufus is a Tit Man’, ‘A Father and a Son’, ‘Father Daughter Dialogue’, ‘That Hospital’, ‘Five Years Old’, ‘Hitting You’, and ‘I’d Rather Be Lonely’.
“For most of my childhood, Loudon talked to me in song, which is a bit of a shitty thing to do, especially as he always makes himself come across as funny and charming while the rest of us seem like whining victims, and we can’t tell our side of the story,” Martha told The Guardian in 2005. “As a result, he has a daughter who smokes and drinks too much and writes songs with titles like ‘Bloody Mother Fucking Asshole’.”
Loudon’s songs to Martha were especially nasty. ‘That Hospital’ infers that Martha was supposed to be aborted, while ‘Five Years Old’ is all about how Loudon was missing his daughter’s fifth birthday party. But nothing even compares to ‘Hitting You’, which details a real-life incident where Loudon struck Martha as a child.
“I would never forget that event, that incident… hauling off and whacking my kid…it’s not something I would ever forget,” Loudon told The A.V. Club in 2022. “There was an interesting song there”.
The song that stuck with Martha the most, however, was ‘I’d Rather Be Lonely’. “I always felt terribly sorry for the poor woman I thought it was about because of the line: ‘Every time I see you cry you’re just a clone of every woman I’ve known’,” Martha explains in The Guardian piece. “Then one time I was on tour with Loudon and he said to the crowd: ‘I wrote this song about my daughter’. I had no idea. We lived together for one year in New York when I was 14 and it was a disaster, and ‘I’d Rather Be Lonely’ was about that year. He really crossed the line there.”
With the central lyric of, “You’re still living here / I’d rather be lonely”, the song is certainly one of the least heartwarming odes to a father-daughter relationship. When she found out it was about her mid-show, Martha was shocked. “A part of me wanted to jump to my death from my tiny seat,” she writes in her memoir Stories I Might Regret Telling You. “Or, better yet, take off into the night, leaving him standing there waiting for me. But the show must go on, so I dried my tears and went down the stairs and onto the stage.”
Is it any surprise then that Martha let it all out with one direct hit of a rebuke? ‘Bloody Mother Fucking Asshole’ is a direct response to the decades of mistreatment and strained connections between Martha and her father, and it proves that wit and razor-sharp observations run in the family. But Martha wasn’t the only one with a bone to pick.
McGarrigle had her own hell to go through with Loudon. After having two kids and spending a number of years together, McGarrigle was pregnant when Loudon absconded to England with a new partner. McGarrigle followed him to try and bring him back, but Loudon was insistent that he was leaving. The stress involved caused McGarrigle to suffer a miscarriage.
The heart-rending tale is laid out in full on McGarrigle’s song ‘Go Leave’. Martha had her own view of the song, calling it “the most gut-wrenchingly painful song ever,” she said. “At the end, you hear the sound of a tear falling onto a string of her guitar. I used to listen to it as a child and cry my eyes out.”
For his part, Rufus has picked up the habit of writing about his family as well. He sings lovingly of his mother in ‘Beauty Mark’, gives Lucy a touching tribute in ‘Little Sister’, and sheds light on his relationship with Martha in the song ‘Martha’. However, perhaps his most famous recollection of family drama is the song ‘Dinner at Eight’.
“We had just done a shoot for Rolling Stone together, and I told him he must be really happy that I got him back in that magazine after all these years,” Rufus recalled to The Guardian. “That sort of kicked things off. Later in the evening he threatened to kill me. So I went home and wrote ‘Dinner at Eight’ as a vindictive retort to his threat.”
Featuring an overarching David and Goliath motif, ‘Dinner at Eight’ plays up the confrontational nature of the pair’s relationship. Although there was plenty of tension and heated exchanges, Rufus insisted to Rolling Stone that ‘Dinner at Eight’ “starts a little rough but is ultimately a love song”.
“[My father] has, for better or worse, no filter whatsoever for what he does,” Rufus told The Independent. “And I admire that, because never have I known a more tormented artist than him. And I mean that respectfully, because he’s just so affected by his artistic radar. We’ve had our feuds, on my part with ‘Dinner at Eight’, but I tend to be a little more romantic in my songs. He lives out every word of his.”
Check out some of the Wainwrights’ family tree of songs down below.
