Howard Fishman’s new book "To Anyone Who Ever Asks: The Life, Music, and Mystery of Connie Converse" comes out tomorrow. It is the mysterious true story of Connie Converse, a mid-century New York City songwriter, singer, and composer whose haunting music never found broad recognition, and one writer’s quest to understand her life.
When Fishman - musician and New Yorker contributor - first heard Connie Converse’s voice on a recording, he was convinced she could not be real. Her recordings were too good not to know, and too out of place for the 1950s to make sense.
And then there was the bizarre legend about Connie Converse that had become the prevailing narrative of her life: that in 1974, at the age of fifty, she simply drove off one day and was never heard from again. Could this have been true? Who was Connie Converse, really?
Supported by a dozen years of research, travel to everywhere she lived, and hundreds of extensive interviews, Fishman approaches Converse’s story as both a fan and a journalist, and expertly weaves a narrative of her life and music, and of how it has come to speak to him as both an artist and a person.
