Darren Senn
Engaging his audiences with storytelling and simple, yet well-crafted songs, Darren Senn is a true entertainer with a broad appeal. His outlaw-folk music is ripe with humor but also goes to the darker reaches of the human condition.
While growing up in the Eugene, Oregon area, Darren never learned an instrument, and his only musical experience was putting rolls in his grandparents’ player piano and pumping the pedals all day long to classical and ragtime tunes.
It wasn’t until age 27, after he’d been living in Lake Tahoe, Nevada for three years that Darren learned his first guitar chord. In the wee hours of the new millennium, a friend showed him the chords to Gordon Lightfoot’s The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald. He learned that song and since then has hardly put the guitar down.
After learning a bunch of folk and rock songs he loved growing up, Darren decided to write some songs of his own. The result was his first album, I Gotta Get Organized (2008), a collection of raw acoustic numbers about women, gambling and wanderlust. Since then he has kept at the writing and made three subsequent albums: Thrift Store Melodies (2015), Detrimental Tendencies (2018) and Live at the Crystal Bay Club (2018), a show he opened for the legendary David Bromberg.
By day, Darren works as a Texas Hold ‘em poker dealer. “I fell into dealing cards in Nevada as a trade because I gravitate to all things Wild West. I love participating in the traditional and shadier side of what makes the west so alluring. Listen to any of my ballads and you’ll see. I feel like I was born a century too late, like I would be right at home settling a dispute with a six shooter in the middle of Main Street. But, hey, that’s where the writing of songs comes in to satisfy my fantasies. I live in my songs. They are real places to me.”
Darren aspires to carry on, in his own style, the magic of the storyteller songwriters like John Prine, Todd Snider and Townes Van Zandt. “What I love most is the ability to connect in a meaningful way with an audience using just an acoustic guitar and some thoughtful words and melodies. That’s a really special place for me. I want us all to go on a little trip somewhere when I get on a stage.
Having played professionally in the northern California/northern Nevada region for 15 years, Darren plans to cover more of the west in 2020. Currently pending is the official video release of his most popular song to date, Gone are the Days. Plans are also in motion to release a digital EP in the spring.
I Could Take Your Love or Leave it - Live
Official Video for "Before the World Blows Up" from the album Detrimental Tendencies, January 2018
I Gotta Get Organized