Loudon Wainwright III & Richard Thompson

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One standard line about these balding folkies is that they've never won the success their talents merit, and thus the world isn't fair. The world isn't fair, as Thompson's and Wainwright's songs remind us, but hey, the two have paid the rent for a combined 80-odd years making sometimes transcendent, infrequently commercial music, which suggests that the world is sometimes fair-ish. Wainwright's songs have chronicled his own and other bourgeois-bohemian lives with heart, wit, and often bold candor. He'll make you laugh, cry, and squirm, sometimes in the same song—he's a master of a seemingly impossible hybrid genre: emotionally affecting novelty songs. Last year's High Wide & Handsome: The Charlie Poole Project is one of his best and least characteristic albums, a double CD of world-weary but life-drunk songs either about or made popular by the great country-music pioneer. Thompson is one of history's few legit folk-rockers—that is to say, he can do both with complete conviction. You won't get to hear him lead a band through one of his slashing electric-guitar solos here, but he's just as impressive stripped down; the guy can write and sing beautifully, can make one acoustic guitar sound like two, can spout clever remarks between songs, can do four or five things extremely well whereas most of us can't do one thing half- or even quarter-assed. Oh, Christ, the world's not fair.
Wed., April 14, 7:30 p.m., 2010