Loudon Wainwright III / High Wide & Handsome - The Charlie Poole Project / 2009
High Wide & Handsome
boisterous, devil-may-care, with a dark undercurrent of resignation
A boozy, boastful anthem of excess dressed up as a philosophy of living large, this track is Wainwright channeling the hard-drinking, hard-living persona associated with old-time string-band musician Charlie Poole. Underneath the party-song bravado sits a wink at its own self-destructiveness, as the narrator openly admits his lifestyle will kill him and doesn't much care.
excess and indulgence mortality and fatalism performance of masculinity nostalgia for old-time Americana self-destruction as identity
Who's speaking
A first-person narrator addressing listeners directly, almost like a toast or a creed recited at a bar; the voice is brash and self-mythologizing, clearly not meant to be taken as sober advice
What happens
The song opens by declaring a personal philosophy of living large rather than small, then catalogs the vices that define that philosophy, moves into a toast-like insistence on living it up because death is coming anyway, admits outright that the habits are fatal, elevates the lifestyle to a stated creed, imagines the inevitable tombstone, and closes by returning to the opening declaration, framing the whole thing as a closed loop rather than a journey
How it's built
Built like a drinking song or folk anthem, with a repeating title phrase functioning as both chorus and refrain bookending the piece. The verses escalate from simple list-making to open acknowledgment of mortality, giving the song a loose arc from swagger to gallows humor even as the musical structure stays circular and incantatory
Section by section
Opening declaration
The song establishes its core opposition between a big, indulgent way of living and a smaller, more cautious existence it dismisses as being for other people. This sets the persona as someone who has already made peace with, even prides himself on, an unapologetic approach to living.
Catalogue verse
“that's 5, 6 and 4”
Listing appetites and vices with comic precision, including a joke about tallying up drinks, turns what could be a confession into a party trick, deflecting any real self-examination with humor.
Toast chorus
The repeated invitation to live it up, justified by the inevitability of death, reframes the whole song as a toast rather than a lament. This is where the fatalism becomes explicit but is immediately absorbed back into celebration.
Confession verse
Here the mask slips slightly: the narrator admits the habits are literally lethal and that he has no intention of stopping, framing persistence in self-destruction as a kind of honesty rather than denial.
Creed verse
Calling the lifestyle a motto and creed elevates personal indulgence to the level of belief system, with wealth explicitly devalued in favor of drink, suggesting the narrator has built an entire worldview around refusing restraint.
Epitaph verse
“laughed twice as hard as I cried”
The imagined tombstone turns abstract fatalism into a concrete image, and the closing boast about laughter outweighing tears offers the song's closest thing to an emotional thesis, insisting the trade-off was worth it.
Craft
- anaphora
- The repeated title phrase opens nearly every verse and the chorus, functioning like a mantra that reinforces the performative bravado of the persona
- list/catalogue
- Vices are tallied almost like a grocery list, including a jokey numbering of drinks, which turns self-destruction into something comic and casual rather than tragic
- epitaph device
- Imagining the carved headstone collapses the whole song's swagger into a single image, making mortality concrete rather than abstract and giving the bravado a punchline
- understatement/irony
- Treating money and life itself as disposable in offhand, cheerful language creates ironic distance between the speaker's stated nonchalance and the real stakes of early death
Reading it
On its surface this is a comic drinking anthem celebrating appetite and refusing moderation, clearly indebted to the persona of old-time musician Charlie Poole, whose own reputation for hard living the album project explicitly honors. Read straightforwardly, it's a tongue-in-cheek toast to living large. A more skeptical reading hears Wainwright, a songwriter known elsewhere for unflinching self-examination, using the exaggerated bravado as a kind of character study or cautionary portrait, letting the narrator's own words about dying from his habits puncture the celebration even as the song keeps smiling through it.
Context
This track comes from Wainwright's 2009 project explicitly built around the life and repertoire of Charlie Poole, an early twentieth-century banjo player whose own hard-drinking reputation and early death are well documented in folk history. The song functions as a tribute to that persona rather than necessarily a direct autobiographical statement by Wainwright himself.
Listen for
- the comic numbering of drinks in the second verse
- how the chorus's repetition builds a chant-like, singalong quality
- the tonal shift when mortality is named outright rather than implied
- the tombstone image as the song's emotional pivot point
- the way the final verse returns to the opening lines, closing the loop
About Loudon Wainwright III
Loudon Snowden Wainwright III is an American singer-songwriter and occasional actor. He has released twenty-six studio albums, four live albums, and six compilations.
b. 1946 / United States
Full biography and catalogue