Wainwright Takes the Fatherly Approach

Through the 31 years of singer-songwriter Loudon Wainwright III’s recording career, he has put out roughly 20 albums containing more than 200 of his songs and played thousands of concerts.

Now it’s finally paying off.

“I’m a TV dad! This is what it’s all been leading up to. That music thing is for suckers,” Wainwright, 55, says, displaying the sense of humor that has marked his music since Day 1, and which led to his role as Hal Karp, father of the main character in the new Fox sitcom “Undeclared,” premiering tonight.

It wasn’t only that sense of humor that inspired series creator Judd Apatow, of “Freaks & Geeks” and “The Larry Sanders Show,” to cast Wainwright as the epitome of every college freshman’s worst nightmare: the parent who won’t let go.

“I’ve been listening to him since I was about 11 or 12,” says Apatow, 33. “As I became interested in being a writer and comedian, he was a big influence on me. What I loved is the way he can be really funny and, at the same time, he can be really brutal and painful. His music helped me through a lot of difficult times. It was good to see someone laughing through his pain.”

Wainwright, who had a recurring role as a singing G.I. in “MASH” in the early ‘70s and has continued to play small parts on television, feature films and on stage, says “I was really happy to be called.”

“From what Judd has told me, my character is based on his father, or at least some aspects of his father,” Wainwright says. “It’s just the idea of this person who is a constant embarrassment to the child, someone who basically won’t go home.”

Hal gets a job and an apartment near the college attended by his son (played by Jay Baruchel) and “I start bonding with [his son] Steven’s friends, much to his pain,” says Wainwright, who spent much of the summer on New York’s Shelter Island (in what he calls “the Wainwright family compound--it’s not quite Hyannisport”).

Apatow says the role isn’t directly modeled on his father or Wainwright. The singer will help shape the character’s development.

“The way Judd works is that the actors have major input,” Wainwright says. “We’ll try it first the way it’s written, then we’ll try it again and he’ll ask people to just wing it and improvise.”

Says Apatow: “Hiring Loudon was a shortcut for me to having an original character, instead of having to think one up. But as I’ve said to other people, if the only purpose this show serves is introducing a few more people to Loudon’s music, then it’ll be a success.”

The part seems tailor-made for Wainwright, whose new album, “The Last Man on Earth,” is being released today in conjunction with the premiere of “Undeclared.” It includes several ruminations on his relationship with his father, who died in 1988, as well as the death of his mother in 1997.

He also frequently explores his real-life role as a dad: His son, Rufus, is himself now a rising singer-songwriter and his daughter, Martha, plays in her brother’s band. Both have been mentioned in his songs since they were infants.

More than probably any musician of his generation, Wainwright has chronicled the myriad facets of family, prominent among them his love-hate relationship with his father, longtime Life magazine columnist Loudon Wainwright II.

In a 1992 song, “A Father and a Son,” he sang:

It never really ends though each race is run

This thing between a father and a son

Maybe it’s power and push and shove

Maybe it’s hate but probably it’s love

He has also sung about raising kids and the joys of being a father, even though, as he put it in “Bein’ a Dad,” “You gotta read them dumb books/And you end up despising Walt Disney.”

For Wainwright, the big question isn’t why he has concentrated so much on family issues in his music, it’s that more people don’t.

“The people in your family--your parents, kids, brothers and sisters--they’re big and powerful people in your life,” he says. “It just seems to me an obvious thing to write about.”

Through heavy dollops of humor and self-revelation, Wainwright has always built layers of complexity into his songs about family. That complexity may or may not find its way into his gig as a TV patriarch who’s more a loving but bumbling Ozzie Nelson than a sagely Ward Cleaver.

“Well, it is a sitcom, and things tend to be broad,” he says. “In one episode I do get back together with my wife, and there are elements that are painful about that....

“But as far as subtleties or the Chekhovian Hal-ness of it all,” Wainwright says with a chuckle, “I don’t know if that’s going to come out.”