Robert Christgau: Dean of American Rock Critics

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Consumer Guide Album

Derek Senn: How Could a Man [self-released, 2019]
In 2014 Senn mailed me a pretty good CD called The Technological Breakthrough with a hand-written bio IDing him as "a singer-songwriter from San Luis Obispo, CA with a wife, a couple of young kids, & a day job." In 2016 followed the better Avuncular. And now comes this unlikely culmination--or is it? As with any singer-songwriter, there's no real telling what's autobiographical and what isn't. But I gotta believe the adoring title song describes his wife: "an EMT she won't shy away/she'll suture cuts/she'll pick a tick right off your nuts," or how about "if you ask her to learn to play the drums and go onstage/she'll learn to play the drums and go onstage"? Ditto for the "Some Chase a Girl" saga in which "she" spurns him in Peru only to track him down in Toledo. But is "The Nuclear Family" sociological or just a bad patch? Is he really turning 50 like in "Have a Nice Day"? When you work nights in "The Song Mine," sometimes the song asserts its own logic. And sometimes, too, it'll hand you an actual tune, which heretofore in Senn's part-time career has been a problem. A-