Career Moves

The title, of course, is ironic given that one of the main reasons Wainwright has remained a cult hero is because he has never had much interest in career strategy. In the sleeve note he even confesses that he's never enjoyed making studio records.
". . . Drinking a lot of bad coffee, furtively thumbing through back issues of Billboard magazine while trying to decide on a drum sound - it's just not my idea of a good time," he writes, with admirable candour.
Further proof that he doesn't take himself too seriously is furnished by the splendid opening track 'Road Ode' wherein Wainwright bemoans the fact that he is still "running through airports at 43/it's O.K. for O.J. but not for me/with a hernia, a bad back and a bum knee . . ."
He may have a misogynistic streak and an unfortunate tendency to stick his tongue out in photographs (nobody but Mick Jagger can do that and not look like a prat), but his self-deprecatory humour and a mean way with a couplet more than compensate for such shortcomings.
Career Moves combines a selection of old favourites like 'The Swimming Song' (best known through the version done by the McGarrigle Sisters) and 'The Man Who Couldn't Cry' with newer material like the wonderful 'I'd Rather Be Lonely'.
Unfortunately it doesn't include the extraordinary song about hitting his daughter - the name of which escapes me - that he did on Later With Jools Holland and at his recent Galway Arts Festival appearance but there are two other very moving songs written for his children - 'Five Years Old' and 'Your Mother And I'.
As the grandson of Peter Stuyvusant, the one-time Governor of New York, Wainwright could never have got away with feigning the "working-class" roots once deemed appropriate for a folksinger. In 'Westchester County' however, he demonstrates his ability to send up his affluent upbringing - while elsewhere his sardonic takes on aspects of modern life from love and sex to drunkenness to the commercialisation of Christmas, confirm his status not as a poor man's Dylan but as a worthy successor to revered American humorists like Mencken, Perelman and Thurber.