POP MUSIC REVIEW : Loudon Wainwright III Mixes Usual Acidity With Acceptance

As if to let everyone at the Troubadour on Tuesday know he still holds his key to the executive washroom at Curmudgeons Unlimited, a slightly graying Loudon Wainwright III got his show rolling with “People in Love,” a bouncy new song that pointedly notes “like famine and earthquakes, love’s part of The Plan.”

And yet, while his nearly two-hour show contained plenty of the familiar Wainwright acid tongue, many numbers from his fine new “History” album, which anchored the 27-song set, betray a greater sense of acceptance of life’s myriad inequities.

Where he used to be angry in one song, joyful in the next, melancholy in another, lately he’s managed to integrate those emotions into more fully dimensional songs: “The Picture,” a guileless reverie inspired by an old photo of himself and his sister as kids, and “A Father and a Son,” a conversation that looks simultaneously backward and forward through his family tree.

In “4x10,” he tosses off a truly nifty double-entendre that neatly crystallizes his whole outlook on love and family: The line “you and I are history” can be taken simply to mean that the relationship is over, but it also conjures the sum total of all the mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, lovers and others we’ve ever loved or hated. And when it comes to that tricky task of trying to make love stay, the two, he posits, are inextricably linked.

While his guitar playing has gained some dexterity over the years, he’ll still never be mistaken for a Richard Thompson, who, not coincidentally, dropped in to fill out several songs with his fleet, often-haunting fret-board work.