Martin Carr has never done things the expected way, and “Connie Converse Is Playing At My House” is proof that he never intends to. The Cardiff-based songwriter, guitarist, filmmaker, and creative force behind The Boo Radleys and bravecaptain has released his strikingly unconventional new single, accompanied by a self-directed animated video, and it’s as fascinating and singular as anything he’s put his name to.
The song grew from an obsession. Carr discovered the story of Connie Converse, a little-known singer-songwriter who home-recorded her own wildly original music in the late 1950s before disappearing in the 1970s, through a true crime podcast. “Within a week I had listened to her songs a thousand times,” he says. “I really connected to her personal and self-effacing lyrics, there is a yearning in her songs that I recognise in my own.” The obsession peaked with a dream: Converse playing in his kitchen on a huge old Moog synth. That image became the song.
The single heralds ‘What Future,’ a new solo album of distracted beats and messy electronics arriving later this year via Carr’s own Sonny Boy Records. It follows ‘The Canton Hours,’ a collection of odds and sods recorded in the wake of his critically acclaimed 2017 solo album ‘New Shapes of Life,’ which Pitchfork called a suave, sophisticated, rhythmically robust pop record, while CLASH gave it a 9/10 and called it very possibly the best thing he’d ever released. Record Collector declared it his finest work since The Boo Radleys.