Homecoming

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I first knew I wanted to be a performer in the kitchen of my Aunt Mary's house in Santa Ana, Calif., when I was seven. At my mother's request, I sang Rosin the Bow in front of her and her twin sister. It was so powerful to sing that old folk song and be showered with love and affection and enthusiasm and encouragement by both of them. That was an event. That was my moment. From there on, when people asked, I didn't say baseball player or cowboy, I said I wanted to be an entertainer. Soon after dropping out of acting school at Carnegie Mellon and after having been busted and bailed out for marijuana possession, I wrote my first song. I was living with my grandmother in Watch Hill, R.I., working in a boatyard, trying to get past being a hippie. I wrote the song Edgar for a lobster fisherman there. It isn't very good, but the next week I wrote three more. I was really enthusiastic. I started doing gigs on the folk scene in New York and Boston, and about a year later I had a deal with Atlantic Records--one of the "new Bob Dylans," the first, I might add.

I've been married [to singer/songwriter Kate McGarrigle] and divorced, have four kids, have been through many relationships. I find myself saying I've always lived alone, even when I was with other people. My relationship with my dad [a well-known columnist for LIFE magazine] was somewhat competitive, but I had an easier time with my mom. She and I were best friends. She was a big impetus for my career. She loved to come to shows! She loved to be singled out in the audience. She was very proud of the successes of the men in her life. More recently she would come and see my son Rufus in school plays at boarding school. It's sad she couldn't enjoy more of his success, but she knew it was happening.

My mother's dying in 1997--the genesis for this whole record [the critically acclaimed Last Man on Earth]--was maybe the most profound event of my life. For the artwork for this album cover, we at first were thinking of an image of a kid in a department store who had lost a parent--to get at this sense not just of overpowering sadness and depression I'd been feeling but also panic, a feeling of being totally lost. I didn't want to do anything. I didn't write songs, didn't even feel like playing. I'd been living in London, at the end of a relationship. I came back and ended up living in my mother's house in Katonah, N.Y., just to be among her things, her furniture and pots and pans. My sisters owned a restaurant in town, so I'd eat free there, every day for a year and a half.

Finally, after I'd been crying so much it didn't feel cathartic or useful anymore, I wrote I'm Not Gonna Cry. ("Listen to the thunder/ Dark clouds fill the sky/ Well it looks like rain and I hear a train/ But I'm not going to cry.") That was the start of getting back to some sense of normalcy. After that, Homeless, Missing You, Living Alone and the others, maybe some of the best songs I've ever written, sort of happened.

I was encouraged by my producers to resist my temptation to include novelty songs on this one, as I've always done before. I'm glad we did. This CD has a serious tone, but I hope it still has a lift.

I know my mother's death changed me, but it's only been four years, and I don't know just how yet. It's funny, and maybe just coincidental, that at 55, after losing both my parents, my career seems to be doing better than ever, with the

TV show [Fox's Undeclared, on which Wainwright plays an annoying dad to his college-going son] and this slightly more mature CD. I wish they were here to see it. I understand more about my father now that Rufus, who is so talented, is doing so well. There's an ambivalence; you're proud and excited, and you're also thinking "What about me?"

I'm not the same without my mother, but it's getting easier. The panic is no longer there. In the early 1970s, I had great success with Dead Skunk, a novelty hit on my third album, but I hid from it. I wasn't ready. As for this recent career attention--I'm ready now! It doesn't mean I'm not anxious about it. But I am enjoying it.

--As told to Harriet Barovick