“Hi. I’m Johnny Cash,” Loudon Wainwright III said upon taking the stage for his sold-out, May 10 appearance at Natalie’s Grandview in Ohio. 

He opened with “Little Piece of Me,” which he claimed was written in Columbus, where the gig took place. But Wainwright is known to lie – see previous paragraph – so who knows. 

Eighty-five minutes later, Wainwright sat down his acoustic guitar, stood up from his stool and continued singing about his funeral on “How Old is 75?” (“so old that you’re barely alive,” he sang). Mic in hand and belting the words, he exited the stage, ascended the stairs, grabbed a glass of red wine from the green room and descended for his encore. 

Wainwright, 76, is going to die. But he’s not sick. Still, the veteran singer/songwriter/musical comedian spent a significant chunk of this show singing and talking – in one of two spoken interludes – about the inevitable. 

As if to make the point that it comes for everyone, Wainwright’s first encore was a singalong rendition of “Dead Skunk,” the number Wainwright said will figure prominently in his obituary. He concluded the evening by accompanying himself on ukulele for “Fun & Free.”

“It’s in terrible tune, but fuck it,” he said of the little red uke. 

With his shock of unkempt, white hair and his shirt collar askew, Wainwright resembled a mad lecturer as he spanned his vast songbook, from “Be Careful, There’s a Baby in the House” to selections from 2022’s Lifetime Achievement to the unrecorded – and hilarious – “The CD Blues,” whose lyrics about hawking wares at gigs he read off an iPad. He took requests (“Men,” “Grey in L.A.”); played a bunch of songs (“I Knew Your Mother,” “Your Mother and I;” and Tom Lehrer’s “Oedipus Rex”) to commemorate the upcoming Mother’s Day holiday; and reminded folks hardship is relative on “It Ain’t Gaza.” 

“It’s not terminal cancer/or Ebola, he sang,” accentuating the positive. 

But it might be COVID-19 for those up front as the bright spotlights illuminated the spit constantly flying from Wainwright’s mouth as he sang. 

Wainwright also read from the iPad for his non-musical segments. Comedic and melancholic, respectively, they found the singular LW3 looking forward to his funeral – with his kids, ex-wives and girlfriends mourning inside while throngs of fans line the streets in gloomy weather – and backward to his childhood love of monster movies and provided a unique twist to an evening with a uniquely twisted entertainer.