Songfacts®:

• "School Days" was the first song on Loudon Wainwright III's eponymous debut album, and is a bitter-edged memoir of his four years at St. Andrew's School in Delaware. If the song conjures images of red blazers, stern professors and solemn bagpipes, it's no mistake; the then all-boys school is also the subject of Robin Williams' Dead Poets Society.
  
  "Back then I considered myself a bit of a young preppie rebel and rather cool. But at the same time I also liked the idea of being the depressed, sensitive nerd type who was beginning to write songs and poems," Wainwright remembers in Washington Square Memoirs: The Great Urban Folk Boom 1950-1970.
  
  Indeed, Wainwright compares himself to classic film rebels Marlon Brando and James Dean, a "blaspheming, blue-jeaned baby boy," then he embodies poets like John Keats and William Blake.
  
  It's easy to imagine Wainwright as one of the boys from the Dead Poets Society, exhilarated by poetry and inspired by the motto Carpe Diem - seize the day! Unfortunately, there was no Robin Williams at St. Andrew's to influence Wainwright.
  
  "In the third verse I vent more than a little spleen towards the school and its faculty," Wainwright explains.
  
  You wicked wise men where you wonder
  You Pharisees one day will pay
  See my lightning, hear my thunder
  I am truth
  I know the way.
• Wainwright says that this is the song that convinced him he had the right stuff. He said in a Mojo interview: "It's a kind of prototype. Confessional, autobiographical. Three chords! At that school, St. Andrews in Middletown, this English teacher said, 'You should be able to describe anything' - a piece of chalk or… and I never was any good at it, but I thought, 'Yeah, you should be able to do that.' And then I found out I could."