> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.hwaelmag.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Connie Converse :: How Sad, How Lovely - URL: https://www.hwaelmag.com/connie-converse-how-sad-how-lovely/ - Published: 2026-10-27T02:15:00.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-27T06:44:52.000Z - Description: Folk recorded in two rooms: the singer-songwriter already had listeners. - Author: Hwael Mag - Tags: Second Hearing, 2026, Folk, Singer-Songwriter ### In August 1956 Elizabeth Converse signed the cover of an album recorded for her brother: “With love and modest pride”. Fifty-three years later, the first record released under her name would be presented as the discovery of a voice nobody had heard. --- From 1950 to 1955 Converse would record a song in her Greenwich Village apartment and post it to Phil, her younger brother, and his wife. About three dozen songs for voice and guitar, which in 1956 she gathered into two volumes, *Musicks*, for the same recipients. Before there was a label there was already a sequence, a format, an audience of two and a delivery schedule. *How Sad, How Lovely* took a different route to release. In 2004 Gene Deitch, animator and recording enthusiast, played “One by One” on the radio. Dan Dzula and David Herman traced the tapes, kept for half a century in two separate places, and in March 2009 released seventeen tracks on Lau Derette. The story that came with the record had been ready for years: a woman whose music was considered uncommercial, who drove off in August 1974 in a Volkswagen Beetle and was never found. On 27 March this year the Third Man edition came out. [How Sad, How Lovely by Connie Converse](https://connieconverse.bandcamp.com/album/how-sad-how-lovely-2?ref=hwaelmag.com) Played again now, the record contains two rooms. Some of the songs come from the tapes Converse made on her own; the others Deitch recorded at his house outside the city, at the gatherings his family hosted. On Deitch’s tapes there are scraps of talk between songs, a murmur in the room, a song begun in the wrong key and started again. On the other tapes the room has gone. She is alone with a machine she runs herself, singing for whoever will play the reel. The point where the record’s documentary nature shows most clearly is its shortest track. “Unknown (A Little Louder, Love)” lasts little more than half a minute: a fragment from Deitch’s tapes, listed without a title of its own and followed by a phrase in brackets. The sequence places it just before “One by One”, and for a moment you hear the room before the song. Taken this way, the songs stop sounding like private confessions never meant to reach anyone. “Roving Woman” borrows the chord changes of familiar standards to tell of a woman walked home by strangers, and it ends with the narrator glad to have been “saved from cards and drink”, a joke that assumes somebody is there to laugh. “Father Neptune” moves with a shanty’s lilt, a tune made to be taken up in chorus, sung here by a single voice that stays ashore. The wife likes to know that when he goes below, it is only below deck. In her mouth, the sailors’ tune lets the woman on shore keep time with the absent man. The intimacy comes from the precision of the address. That carefully assembled sequence smooths over a difference the record itself documents. Nothing in the running order marks the move from one room to the other, and thirty-seven minutes pass as a single evening in a single place. Subsequent editions have added more recordings; the Third Man reissue includes a remix of “Playboy of the Western World”. GROUND SECTION / 01 SELECT A LAYER 01 THE APARTMENT Grove Street / reels sent by post / overdubs 02 THE HOUSE Hastings-on-Hudson / Crestwood 404 / Prague 03 THE CABINET an Ann Arbor garage / a letter / restoration 04 THE REISSUE 2015 vinyl / Third Man 2026 / a 7" Converse's first studio was the room she lived in, and her first audience had a postal address. The reels left the Grove Street apartment for Phil Converse and his wife, members of a private song-of-the-month club. The first mailing was "Down This Road", in 1950; the last "Empty Pocket Waltz", in 1955\. In 2023 the two-volume collection, about three dozen songs, was released digitally as *Musicks*, restored by Dan Dzula. Two of the songs, "Down This Road" and "We Lived Alone", also exist in double-tracked arrangements, issued in 2020 on the *Sad Lady* EP. The second room had guests and a host with a tape recorder. From 1954 Converse was a guest at the salons and dinners the Deitch family hosted at Hastings-on-Hudson. Gene Deitch, illustrator and animator, recorded her on a Crestwood 404 for an audience of friends. Through one of his contacts she appeared the same year on CBS's *Morning Show* with Walter Cronkite, her only known public performance. Deitch kept the tapes for decades; by 2009 his collection was in Prague, where he lived. In January 2004 he played a recording of "One by One" on *Spinning on Air*, David Garland's programme on WNYC. For decades, much of the archive sat in a garage filing cabinet. The reels sent to Phil Converse stayed in a filing cabinet in his Ann Arbor garage, where Converse's archive was kept and where, years later, Howard Fishman would find the letter headed "To Anyone Who Ever Asks". After the 2004 broadcast, Dan Dzula and David Herman obtained Deitch's tapes and the family's, and restored them at Elias Arts in New York. According to Dzula the original tapes were in excellent physical condition, though the recordings still needed a lot of work before release. Lau Derette, the label, was launched with this record. The collection has expanded across successive editions. The 2009 CD holds seventeen tracks. The 2015 vinyl, on Squirrel Thing with Captured Tracks, closes with "I Have Considered the Lilies". The Third Man edition of 27 March 2026, again overseen by Dzula, comes on CD, cassette and LP. The vinyl edition includes a bonus 7-inch with the unreleased "House" and a new version of "Playboy of the Western World", a song whose original recording is credited to Deitch, titled "The Online Parades Mix". WHAT REMAINS Published credits assign some tracks to Converse's own recorder and others to Deitch's, and the credits consulted differ on the exact split; the original booklet still needs to be checked. That the talk between songs belongs only to Deitch's tapes is a reading of the sound, not a credit. The sources consulted do not explain the parenthetical "A Little Louder, Love", attached to an untitled fragment. None of the material gathered here establishes where Converse went after August 1974\. In 2009 the record ended on “Trouble”, with the question of where to find another soul to tell her troubles to, and then the tape stopped. On the cover of *Musicks* the signature was Elizabeth Converse. The name she had taken in New York was Connie. ---