it challenged the assumptions and illusions to which most of us cling in order to make our way. More amazing is that Wainwright is fully aware of this quality in himself and his work. "Be Careful, There's a Baby in the House" on Album II could just as well have been about Loudon as about an infant. If the identification weren't complete, the song would be insufferably cute. But it is complete, and the song is true.

This is the dangerous line Wainwright has chosen to take in most of his best songs. Such risk would be catastrophic for a lesser talent. Naked self-exposure that isn't self-destructive is uncommon among artists in any medium. To pull it off requires a suspension of ego but also a high degree of instinctive trust in one's self, not to mention one's audience. In the first two albums the risk was made greater by their poor production values; the sound was claustrophobic; Loudon strummed acoustically, with little or no backup. Often his voice strained uncomfortably above its normal register, and in singing songs like "Hospital Lady" he occasionally resorted to a style as cloying as Melanie's. Yet the records were wonderful. The crudeness of production, the extremely static nature of the music itself: these at least accentuated the poetry by making it inescapable.

Except perhaps for Lou Reed, Wainwright is alone among songwriters in being able to write on almost any subject and make it pertinent and funny, but more than that to communicate a perception of the world that rings a bell in your head and makes you realize that, like it or not, this is how it really is; this is the messy texture of life itself; this is how I feel, how we all feel, and isn't it great that here's someone who can give us back to our selves and our commonality.

In Album III, almost all the faults evident on the earlier albums have been corrected. The sound is excellent; so are Thomas Jefferson Kaye's arrangements. The backups by Loudon's band, White Cloud, are a model of unobtrusiveness—lean but tasty. And the songs themselves are musically stronger and lyrically as good or better than those on albums I and II. "Dead Skunk," the opener, is delightful good-time country rock with lots of plunking banjo. The perfect comic intro, quelches any expectation of pontification or deliberate display of "superior sensitivity." A dead skunk