Anonymous
As I tend to watch a lot of movies, sometimes it's easier for me to find myself listening to recording artists that I wouldn't normally come across by even if I was deliberately trying to find something new and fresh to my ears. Such was the case with Linda Perhacs. I happened to listen to her while watching Daft Punk's amazing retro-sci-fi movie ELECTROMA, a movie with no dialogues whatsoever and with a soundtrack compiled by the french electro-dance duo entirely from tracks they loved or found that best suited the movie. I was completely mesmerized by the track you can listen to below - If You Were My Man - and played it over and over again when I finally got the DVD until I realized I had to further investigate this mysterious artist that noone seemed to know about. And so I got the album.

Parallelograms
was Perhacs first and only album (again, my penchant for artists with very short careers on full display here...) and it's a beauty with songs that range from the beautifully introspective to the exquisitely arranged. If she recorded more albums, she could have been a contender with Joni Mitchell for one of the best female recording artists of the 70's, because even on this, her debut, she already showed signs of songwriting greatness. As proof, the song below is a sort of B-side as it wasn't even included on the album itself when it came out. Now you can imagine the quality of the other ones. Highly recommended, of course.

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1 Response
  1. Peter Says:

    Among the rediscovered folk goddesses championed by blogs, record stores, and print publications, Judee Sill remains my favorite. I never connected to the Linda Perhacs album in the same way. That being said, this version of "If You Were My Mind" is an all-time classic, haunting and heartbreaking.