Loudon Wainwright III has a long history of writing songs that express his mind and he’s now turned his sites on the 2016 presidential race.
With his new song I Had a Dream, Wainwright sings of the nightmare that he believes would come with a Donald Trump presidency. Listing off possible members of the Trump cabinet, Loudon produces what Salon calls “a bleak dystopian future”.
Wainwright said of the track “Initially I didn’t want to write a song about Donald Trump but sometimes in the course of human events things get so weird that you can’t look a gift horse in the mouth, especially if the horse has a real mouth on him. In the past, I’ve taken pot shots in song at political figures of fun like Jesse Helms, Newt Gingrich, Bill & Hill, Bush, Cheney, et al., but folks – this is serious. We hold some truths to be self-evident and apparently Mr. Trump does not. As Judd Apatow succinctly put it to me after hearing ‘I Had A Dream,’ – ‘The only person who benefits from Trump now is you!'”
Over his 46 year recording career, Wainwright has released 23 studio albums with his trademark biting satire a regular feature including Attempted Mustache (1973), Social Studies (1999), High, Wide and Handsome: The Charlie Poole Project (2009) and 10 Songs For the New Depression (2010). He has also acted in numerous projects including the TV series M*A*S*H and Apatow’s Undeclared along with movies such as Big Fish, The Aviator, The Forty Year Old Virgin and Knocked Up.
Here is a video of the song shot last month in Portland:
