Oedipus Wreck

Maybe, by now, you've caught an episode of the terrific new Fox sitcom Undeclared and seen the tall, grinning goofus who plays the dad of the show's college-freshman hero. The character, Hal, is middle-aged crazy -- recently divorced and rootless, nutty about his son but distractedly self-absorbed, prone to getting drunk or into an argument.

As good as Undeclared is, the man who plays Hal -- actor and singer-songwriter Loudon Wainwright III, 55 -- has topped even Hal's comic existential crisis over the course of 20 albums, each a collection of scabrous, ruthlessly honest, funny-because-it-hurts songs about marriage, philandering, divorce, parenthood, drunkenness, and death. Wainwright's latest gathering of such material is the vibrant Last Man on Earth, which snagged an A a few weeks ago in this magazine's back pages. All this, plus he's the perpetrator of the jaunty gross-out novelty hit ''Dead Skunk'' (which his bio lists as having been No. 1 in Little Rock, Ark., for six weeks in 1972) and the parent (along with ex-wife and superlative-musician-her-own-self Kate McGarrigle) of currently prominent singer-songwriter Rufus Wainwright, who -- follow me now -- was immortalized as a suckling infant in Loudon's 1975 song ''Rufus Is a Tit Man'' and who does a spine-tingling cover of Dad's lovely 1985 song ''One-Man Guy'' on his recent album Poses.

Last Man on Earth is mostly about the death of Loudon's mother, Martha, in 1997. On the record's final song, ''Homeless,'' he sings, ''People have called to find out if I'm fine/I assure them I am/But I'm not/It's a line.'' Spooning a cup of New England clam chowder in Manhattan's Oyster Bar one recent evening, Wainwright says, ''One image we almost used for the cover was a picture of a kid lost in a department store, looking for his mother. It kind of felt like that: I literally felt lost, not knowing which way to go. My father had died 12 years ago and that was big, but in a sense liberating. I knew that when my mother died that it was going to be bad, but I had no idea just how bad. I wrote 'I'm Not Gonna Cry' because I had gone through this thing of crying all the time, and the cathartic aspect of it had long since gone. I'd just burst into tears.'' The creases in his face grow more creases as he laughs ruefully. ''I'm better now.''

Not that it didn't take a while. ''My instinct was to go not just back to my hometown, but to move into the house that she actually lived in -- a homing instinct.'' Soon after his mother's death, Wainwright holed up in her small house in Katonah, N.Y. -- ''That's Native American for 'dysfunctional,''' he often jokes from the stage. Over soup, he's more serious. ''It became unbearable after a while, but at first it felt like the right thing to do. It coincided with the breakup of a relationship I was in. I had to decide where I wanted to be, and this place was filled with all these artifacts from my life. My sisters live in the same town.'' Those sisters, Sloan and Teddy, also musicians, ran a coffee shop nearby; he took comfort in family and ''saw a shrink twice a week'' because he wasn't sure he could write songs again.