Listeners who are likely to find Grown Man most satisfying are those who have been waiting 24 years for Loudon Wainwright III to record a follow-up to Dead Skunk. Where so much of his subsequent material has been as serious as a heart attack (or at least a divorce), his new album returns to the novelty vein that gave him his only semihit.

In "IWIWAL" ("I wish I was a lesbian"), the proudly insensitive singer/songwriter gets in touch with his feminine side. "1994" offers a romp through the fields of genetic engineering, "Housework" is a country weeper about house husbanding while the wife's on the town, and "Cobwebs" laments the revival of the verbal tic like. For any public-radio or adult-alternative station with a slot for the change-of-pace zany, old Loudon's your man.

Although few can match Wainwright's sublime sense of the ridiculous, his better material elicits laughter that is nervous rather than hearty, while his best isn't funny at all. Two cuts rank among Wainwright's most devastating. "A Year" recounts the first year in the life of a baby born into a broken relationship, abandoned by a father who "didn't pick you up because I'd have to put you down." "Dreaming" finds David Mansfield's guitar turning the melody into a narcotic seduction as Wainwright sings: "I'd rather be dreaming than living/A day's just a thing to get through/Living's just too hard to do."

Anticipating the complaint that he is a little too fond of his own pathos, Wainwright duets with daughter Martha on "Father/Daughter Dialogue," on which she charges him with evading familial responsibility through his music, and he counters: "The guy singing the songs ain't me. He's someone people wish I was." Although her argument is more convincing, the fact that he allows her to make it on his album (and likely wrote it for her) takes confessionalism to a new level. Much of what Wainwright shares with his listeners, most folks would be embarrassed to tell their shrinks. (RS 726)

DON MCLEESE