Bruner- Songs For A Friend

Label: Numerophon Reissued 2010 These six cuts—five doleful reinterpretations and one self-penned pastoral love song—are the last of Linda Bruner's known recordings. This aching set of missives "to a friend" took place in the back of Nielsen's 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 must've occurred between Bruner's studio work with Pisces—Krein and Paul DiVenti's Rockford psych-rock outfit—and the release of her haunting "Sam" b/w "O