Loudon Wainwright III Brings the Confessional Folk (and the Family Jokes) to the Enmore

Loudon Wainwright III is coming back to Australia for the first time in nearly twenty years, and he is opening the run in Sydney. The man who more or less invented oversharing in song, decades before anyone had a group chat to do it in, plays the Enmore Theatre on Saturday 6 February 2027. If your idea of a good night is a song that makes you laugh and then quietly ruins you, clear the date.

When, where and how to get in

The facts, up top:

• Who: Loudon Wainwright III.
• Where: the Enmore Theatre, Sydney.
• When: Saturday 6 February 2027.
• On-sale: 24 July at 11am local time, through Destroy All Lines.

One of the pillars of confessional folk

Wainwright is one of the pillars of confessional folk songwriting, the style where the songwriter turns the microphone on their own life and does not flinch. He pioneered that oversharing approach back in the 1970s, first on Atlantic Records, then Columbia, and scored a genuine Top 20 hit in 1972 with 'Dead Skunk', a song about exactly what it says it's about. Thirty-odd albums later, including the Grammy-winning 'High Wide & Handsome' in 2009, he is still at it.

The songbook runs deep. 'The Swimming Song' and 'Daughter' are the ones people tend to arrive knowing, and his writing has been covered by Johnny Cash, Mose Allison and Bonnie Raitt, which is about as broad a church of admirers as a folk songwriter can hope for. Here is one to get reacquainted before February.

Part concert, part confession, part comedy set

A Loudon Wainwright show is described as part concert, part confession, part comedy set, which is a lot to fit on one poster but a fair warning for the night. He is very funny between songs and then very not, sometimes inside the same three minutes. It is the folk equivalent of your uncle telling a joke at a wake and everyone laughing before they remember why they are there.

If the surname rings a bell, that is the other thing: he is the father of three musicians, Rufus Wainwright, Martha Wainwright and Lucy Wainwright Roche, so the confessional songwriting clearly ran in the water at that house. Rufus shared the news to his own followers, most of whom now know the tour exists.

The full Australian tour

Five cities, Sydney first. Here's the run.

How to actually get a seat

This is not going to be a stadium-scramble on-sale, which is a mercy, but a first Australian visit in twenty years by an artist people have loved for fifty will move quicker than you'd think, and the Enmore is not enormous. So the plan is boring and it works: put a reminder in your phone for 11am on 24 July, have your details ready, and buy from Destroy All Lines, the official tour seller, not a resale page charging double for the same seat.

Honest take: for a show like this you almost certainly won't need to panic. Buy on the on-sale, sit somewhere you can hear every word, because with this bloke the words are the entire point. Chasing more to do in town while you wait? The Sydney what's on hub and Ticketted's discover page have you covered.

The takeaway

A songwriter who has spent fifty years telling the truth in three-minute increments, back in Sydney for the first time in two decades, in a room built for exactly this. Get the ticket, bring someone who won't judge you for tearing up at 'Daughter', and let Loudon do the oversharing so you don't have to. I'll be there, pretending the thing in my eye is hay fever in February.