The compilation is ephemera embalmed, the eternal document of an artist defined by inner restlessness and ultimate transience… perfect listening, then, for the most transient and restless of seasons. How Sad, How Lovely a ghostly endeavor it’s also what makes it brilliant. “Roving Woman”, a brilliant feminist ditty and one of the album’s highlights, charts Converse’s inner conflict with staying or leaving - the tensions of transformation as one, at a certain age, deliberates between settling down or living nomadically: “People say a roving woman / Is likely not to be, better than she ought to be / So when I stray away from where I’ve got to be / Someone always takes me home.” It, too, prophesies Converse’s own trajectory: disillusioned with her lack of success (save for one live performance on The Morning Show with Walter Cronkite in 1954), and feeling alienated from modern American life, Converse disappeared in her Volkswagen Beetle in 1974 and was never heard from again. Converse never explicitly sings of autumn, though her songs possess a haunting, lovelorn quality congruent with the saudade of the season. How Sad, How Lovely, courtesy Squirrel Thing Recordings.
The New Hampshire-born Manhattanite is often regarded as the “inventor” of the singer-songwriter genre, though her music remained obsolete until little over a decade ago, when a collection of never-before-heard, lo-fi demos were released in the form of a compilation album, Listen for: “Curl Your Toes” 9. Connie Converse – How Sad, How Lovely (2009, Squirrel Thing Recordings)įew singer-songwriters point to Connie Converse as a key progenitor of their work, but they should. One only wonders why radio jockeys failed to play her work in its time. There are no questions to be asked the music speaks for itself. There are tinges of comfort, but mostly of longing a sedentary warmth roused by the impetus of plunging temperatures, birds migrating, leaves changing color. John best captures the duplicitous essence of the season. The titles alone of tracks like “Autumn Lullaby” and “The Road Was Lonely” conjure images of pastoral melancholy and chlorophyll-drained woodland, but it’s in songs like “Curl Your Toes” and “The Curious Crystals of Unusual Purity” that St. She sings like Nico and plays like Nick Drake, particularly during the former’s Chelsea Girl period and the latter’s Pink Moon days an intoxicating mix that’s garnered, inexplicably, less critical adoration than the work of those two giants.
John became a British cult figure in the wake of her critically-lauded sophomore LP Songs for the Gentle Man (1971), though it’s in her debut album Ask Me No Questions (1969) that the artist taps into her signature sound in ways no-holds-barred and divinely autumnal. John – Ask Me No Questions (1969, Dandelion)
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