These six cutsfivedoleful reinterpretations and one self-penned pastoral love songare the last of Linda Brunersknown recordings. This aching set of missives to a friend took place in the back of Nielsens Music Store of Rockford, Illinois, and was captured by a modest portable half-track borrowed from A.L.S. Studios. Unrehearsed and raw, Linda chose songs she knew and felt deeply, allowing Pisces guitarist Jim Krein to fill acres of space between the lyrics with his acoustic guitar. The heavy, almost desperate tone of these readings suits the Linda Bruner that her classmates and friends at Harlem High School recall. A poor kid from the depressed Loves Park suburb, Bruner was a girl who barely escaped from a tract housing development as rudimentary as her own vocal style. This impromptu tracking mustve occurred between Bruner’s studio work with PiscesKrein and Paul DiVentis Rockford psych-rock outfitand the release of her haunting Sam b/w Oh Lord 45 on the local Vincent imprint. The label’s mishandling of her recorded debut left Bruner disillusioned enough to abandon most of her musical ambitions, so it’s hard to call any of these morose renditions anything more than a fleeting moment of creativity. Bruner’s pained delivery drags any shred ofpop sensibility out of each future classic, infusing every chorus with new, darker vitality. She sounds comforted only by love’s sheltering embrace on her lone untitled and original ballad. This neglected lovers note caught our eye by chance, the blue spine of its box crying out from a disheveled clutch of Pisces outtake reels. We’ve chosen to preserve the tape’s intimacies, allowing it to roll through its imperfections, bits of banter, and hiss. Even Kreins benevolent voice can be heard, as it coaxes Lindas pleadings along. If her disconsolate pop recreations reveal a tormented songbird soaring toward the edge of despair, its only affirmation of what little we know for sure about Linda Bruner, now long lost.