Connie Converse 
How Sad, How Lovely 
Squirrel Thing
Street: 03.17 (Vinyl Release) 
Connie Converse = Sara Carter + Harry McClintock + Susan Reed
 
I think of folk music as the purest music about the human experience. There’s just no bullshit when it comes to folk music—it’s just stories set to song, and that’s it. Connie Converse was a Greenwich Village singer/songwriter from the ’50s and ‘60s who never quite found her audience, then moved to Michigan and disappeared, never to be heard from again. These recordings, made at friends’ houses and various informal performances, are beautiful, haunting folk songs from a voice who felt every note of what she sang. The song “Playboy of the Western World,” the story of a fast-living, affable young man, seems so ahead of its time and still feels timeless. This record is an interesting look back at someone who was able to create the kind of songs that nobody had heard before. –James Orme