Nearly 51 years after the singer-songwriter’s disappearance comes the first reissue of this album in nearly 10 years in any format. 20 tracks (including a bonus 7" featuring the previously unreleased “House” and the new remix of “Playboy of the Western World” courtesy of Dirick Cummins) that are as poignant and potent as ever and showcase an artist that was operating light years ahead of her time.

Connie Converse was among the first modern singer-songwriters, a truly unique artist whose unconventional, hypnotically intimate songs were far ahead of their time. Born in Laconia, New Hampshire, in 1924 to strict, religious parents, she excelled academically and briefly attended Mount Holyoke College before moving to New York City in the late 1940s. There, she lived a quiet, bohemian life, and, by 1949, began writing a remarkable body of original songs. Those songs were committed to tape over the next decade, as Converse began recording herself at home on a Crestwood 404 reel-to-reel tape recorder. Starting in 1954, legendary comic artist and animator Gene Deitch also began recording Converse at his Hastings-on-Hudson home, where she was a guest at salons and dinner parties hosted by the Deitch family. Converse’s haunting music blended folk, jazz, and art-song influences, with sophisticated, deeply introspective lyrics that explored themes of longing, independence, and self-knowledge, later becoming hallmarks of the 1960s singer-songwriter movement.