Album review

Archetypal baby boomer, WASP troubadour, and fearless diarist Loudon Wainwright III cheerfully admits that his work is baldly autobiographical, and this 1989 chapter is among the liveliest and most emotionally complex installments. Who else could build a low-keyed country song that nails the title song's subject in every detail ("There is a nice big box of Kleenex/If you break down and start to bawl..."), acknowledging its curative potential while poking fun at the process? . Elsewhere, he sifts through parental relationships ("Your Father's Car"), music videos, one-night stands, and, on the album's most powerful song "Thanksgiving," dysfunctional families. That song, graced by Richard Thompson's beautifully restrained electric guitar, compresses a family's tangled emotional history into a single night, with the nuance and richness of a John Updike story. --Sam Sutherland