{"id":29883,"date":"2024-08-29T16:44:59","date_gmt":"2024-08-29T16:44:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/museumofnonvisibleart.com\/authorsite\/?p=29883"},"modified":"2024-08-29T17:09:57","modified_gmt":"2024-08-29T17:09:57","slug":"howard-fishman","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/museumofnonvisibleart.com\/authorsite\/howard-fishman\/","title":{"rendered":"Howard Fishman"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Howard Fishman<\/a>\u00a0<\/span>is a regular contributor to\u00a0<\/span>The New Yorker <\/i>and The New York Times<\/i>, where he has published essays on music, film, theater, literature, travel, and culture. His\u00a0bylines have also appeared in the\u00a0<\/span>The Boston Glove<\/i>,\u00a0<\/span>Rolling Stone<\/i>,\u00a0<\/span>The Telegraph<\/i>,\u00a0<\/span>Vanity Fair<\/i>,\u00a0<\/span>The Washington Post<\/i>,\u00a0<\/span>Artforum<\/i>,\u00a0<\/span>San Francisco Chronicle<\/i>,\u00a0<\/span>Mojo<\/i>,\u00a0<\/span>The Village Voice<\/i>,\u00a0<\/span>Jazziz<\/i>, and\u00a0<\/span>Salmagundi<\/i>. His play,\u00a0<\/span>A Star Has Burnt My Eye<\/i>, was a\u00a0<\/span>New York Times\u00a0<\/span><\/i>\u201cCritics Pick.\u201d As a performing songwriter and bandleader, Fishman has toured internationally as a headlining artist for over two decades. He has released eleven albums to date, and is the producer of the album\u00a0<\/span>Connie\u2019s Piano Songs: The Art Songs of Elizabeth \u201cConnie\u201d Converse<\/i>. His book, To Anyone Who Ever Asks: The Life, Music, and Mystery of Connie Converse<\/i>, was shortlisted for the Plutarch\u00a0Award for Best Biography of 2023.<\/p>\n

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\"\"About\u00a0To Anyone Who Ever Asks<\/h2>\n
\"\"
\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 Connie Converse, Schenectady, NY, 1955<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Shortlisted for the Plutarch Award for best biography.<\/p>\n

The mysterious true story of Connie Converse\u2014a mid-century New York City songwriter, singer, and composer whose haunting music never found broad recognition\u2014and one writer\u2019s quest to understand her life<\/em><\/p>\n

This is the mesmerizing story of an enigmatic life. When musician and\u00a0New Yorker<\/em>\u00a0contributor Howard Fishman first heard Connie Converse\u2019s 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\u2014a singer who seemed to bridge the gap between traditional Americana (country, blues, folk, jazz, and gospel), the Great American Songbook, and the singer-songwriter movement that exploded a decade later with Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell.<\/p>\n

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?<\/p>\n

Supported by a dozen years of research, travel to everywhere she lived, and hundreds of extensive interviews, Fishman approaches Converse\u2019s 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. Ultimately, he places her in the canon as a significant outsider artist, a missing link between a now old-fashioned kind of American music and the reflective, complex, arresting music that transformed the 1960s and music forever.<\/p>\n

But this is also a story of deeply secretive New England traditions, of a woman who fiercely strove for independence and success when the odds were against her; a story that includes suicide, mental illness, statistics, siblings, oil paintings, acoustic guitars, cross-country road trips, 1950s Greenwich Village, an America marching into the Cold War, questions about sexuality, and visionary, forward thinking about race, class, and conflict. It\u2019s a story and subject that is by turn hopeful, inspiring, melancholy, and chilling.<\/p>\n

Credits for Talkin\u2019 Like You<\/em> and Birthday song excerpt: The Musick Group<\/a>.<\/i><\/p>\n

Age of Noon: Produced by Howard Fishman<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/section>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Howard Fishman\u00a0is a regular contributor to\u00a0The New Yorker and The New York Times, where he has published essays on music, film, theater, literature, travel, and culture. His\u00a0bylines have also appeared in the\u00a0The Boston Glove,\u00a0Rolling Stone,\u00a0The Telegraph,\u00a0Vanity Fair,\u00a0The Washington Post,\u00a0Artforum,\u00a0San Francisco Chronicle,\u00a0Mojo,\u00a0The Village Voice,\u00a0Jazziz, and\u00a0Salmagundi. His play,\u00a0A Star Has Burnt My Eye, was a\u00a0New York Times\u00a0\u201cCritics […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":16239,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-29883","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-interview","8":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/museumofnonvisibleart.com\/authorsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29883","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/museumofnonvisibleart.com\/authorsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/museumofnonvisibleart.com\/authorsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/museumofnonvisibleart.com\/authorsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/museumofnonvisibleart.com\/authorsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29883"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/museumofnonvisibleart.com\/authorsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29883\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29911,"href":"https:\/\/museumofnonvisibleart.com\/authorsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29883\/revisions\/29911"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/museumofnonvisibleart.com\/authorsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16239"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/museumofnonvisibleart.com\/authorsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29883"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/museumofnonvisibleart.com\/authorsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29883"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/museumofnonvisibleart.com\/authorsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29883"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}