If you like: the folk prowess of Bridget St John, Joan Baez, Caroline Peyton, or Vashti Bunyan, Linda Perhacs is a name to know and love.
About: Linda Perhacs is a California-based singer/songwriter whose first–and for decades, only–album, Parallelograms, is regarded as a psych-folk masterpiece, highly influential among songwriters including Opeth’s Mikael Akerfeldt, Devendra Banhart, Joanna Newsom, and many others.
    Perhacs was a purposeful but very private songwriter living on Topanga Canyon Boulevard and working as a dental hygienist when Grammy- and Emmy-winning composer Leonard Rosenman (Rebel Without a Cause and Barry Lyndon) walked into her office for an appointment. After ten more, he inquired about what she did with her spare time. She revealed only then that she was a songwriter. He asked to hear what she wrote, and was impressed when he did. He arranged a record deal for her with Kapp, a Universal subsidiary, hired the players (including drummer Shelly Manne), and produced the recording sessions that resulted in Parallelograms.
    When Perhacs heard the acetate, she was mortified–as was Rosenman. In the final mix, the label had deleted all the highs and lows on the record, trying to create songs that would be friendly to AM radio. Perhacs and Rosenman had heard Parallelograms as a decidedly FM album.
    She went back to her job as a dental hygienist and dropped completely out of sight, though she continued to write.
    In the mid-‘90s, Michael Piper, whose label The Wild Places reissued obscure psychedelic records, made numerous attempts to contact Perhacs but was unsuccessful. He eventually re-released Parallelograms anyway, making notes in the package about trying to locate her. Contact was eventually made–she still lived on Topanga Canyon Boulevard and worked as a dental hygienist–and a deal was arranged for a more official reissue. He used her source tapes, which were sonically superior to the badly mastered Kapp album, and re-released the recording in 2003 with bonus material. Parallelograms’ reputation and its artist’s–especially among younger music fans and musicians–spread. Since then, the record has undergone numerous re-pressings.*^{Thom Jurek}
A favorite track: Paper Mountain Man