简介： For years Connie Converse was a forgotten pioneer. Long before the “singer-songwriter” genre existed, she wrote and sang songs that were per 更多>
For years Connie Converse was a forgotten pioneer. Long before the “singer-songwriter” genre existed, she wrote and sang songs that were personal, that told stories, that were musically simple (and beautiful) but lyrically clever. This was in the 1950s in New York, and her music was so far ahead of its time that no record company wanted to record it. (It would have fit in perfectly with the great singer-songwriters of the ’60s, like Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell.) After about a decade of failing to make it in the music industry, she became disheartened and moved to Ann Arbor, where she worked as an editor for a while. Then in 1974, hopeless and depressed, she packed her belongings into her Volkswagen Beetle and drove away, never to be heard from again. Thirty-five years later, her recordings from the ’50s were discovered and released as this album, to much critical acclaim and “How have we not heard of her till now?!”-ism. The collection is indeed so sad and so lovely—the songs are lilting, haunting remnants of a life that didn’t go entirely to plan. “Roving Woman” is especially eerie when you know her whole story (“When I stray, there’s positively got to be someone there to take me home”). “Talkin’ Like You (Two Tall Mountains)” is a beautiful song where the song’s chorus, instead of coming between the verses, appears twice, at the beginning and the end, like two bookends (or, come to think of it, two tall mountains), and the stuff in between changes its meaning. It will echo in your mind for days. There are tinges of gritty sarcasm, too, like Alanis Morrisette except a good 40 years earlier. If she’s alive today, Converse is 85 years old, and maybe she’s smiling somewhere and saying, “I told them so.” —Minna
