"universally unexplored testimonies to introspection that play like cherished classics, as the melodies fill your awareness with an accumulation of staggering grace."
- Mike Pursley, Tiny Mixtapes

A Note From the Management:
These tracks are a tiny sample of the works of Jimmy Crouse. However, they are unique in the cannon in that they are the only recordings that were created with the help of others, either musicians or studio engineers. For a musician whose work is so identified with solitude, these stand in contrast. They are reproduced here humbly, without the involvement of those who helped record them a quarter-century ago. This is effectively a bootleg release, done with Jimmy's approval. Efforts were made to contact the other parties involved, if you are one we'd love to hear from you. - Rich Pell

Some Words on Jimmy Crouse from Ian Nagoski:
The fruit tree that grows in your yard is yours in a way that can never be understood by anyone who eats the apples you sell from it. You see what kind of weather it lives in and what kinds of bugs it suffers. You know its texture and leaves and appreciate what it gives more than anyone else. Especially if you really need it. And especially if nothing else tastes as good to you.

Provenance in music is complicated by dissemination, by recording and distribution. When we listen to these recordings by the songwriter and singer Jimmy Crouse from 25-30 years ago, you'll want to know something about what and why they are. So, I'll tell you what I know.

A half an hour south of Philadelphia in northern Delaware, there was a little, independent record shop called Bert's. Two guys who worked there around 1991 - Chris Vanderloo and Tom Capodanno - were heavy into music, and they knew a guy who wrote and performed really intense songs. I worked there, too, but I was much younger than them. I was 16 and gazed up in wonder at most of the music-world at the time, them included. So, when they put out a 7" record of two songs by their friend Jimmy Crouse, I was all ears.

I liked what they liked. I liked Galaxie 500's This is Our Music, which was still new and slow and dreamy. I liked Sebadoh III, which came out right then and was messy and personal and cheap-sounding, like Daniel Johnston, who I thought of as emblematic, so I liked it by proxy. I didn't like Codeine's Frigid Stars, which came out right about then, which was bigger and heavier and slow but never spoke to me. I liked Slint's Spiderland a lot, which came out just a bit later, and then I didn't like it that much. When Lucinda Williams' Sweet, Old World came out, I liked that a lot and kept liking it, because her voice was believable and the songs were deep.

We were absorbing music. Some of it seemed good then and turned out not to be that great. Some of it, we liked more as time went on. Some of it, we liked, and the larger world found out how good it was. A lot of it, we liked and no one else seemed to have heard.

Part of the process was going to shows to see music being played. Around 1992 and '93, I went to see Jimmy Crouse play a bunch of times as an opening act for Delaware bands - Raymond Listen/ Licorice Roots, Zen Guerrilla, Caterpillar - or playing in a coffee shop on the main street of Newark, Delaware. He was intense. I never thought to talk to him but only admired him. I knew I was in the presence of a real artist, so I took the songs in like paintings in a museum.

He was inward, looking down, hunched over a dreadnought guitar, singing long, hard lines of long, hard words. He only ever played about twenty minutes - six songs - and barely spoke. I remember him playing in a bar in front of the "scene" one night. A girl shouted a "woo!" after one song. Jimmy replied, "thank you," and then paused before continuing, "for making me feel uncomfortable."

I felt a total "yes" happen in me every time I listened to him. He never played the A side of the single, "Myth of Lummox," which I guessed he didn't like that much, but he almost always played the B-side, "The Countryside," slower and harder and better than on the record. I taped two sets he did on the college radio station and learned to play the songs at home, making my breath hold through the melodies and getting the pitch strong without any breaks or vibrations. And as I watched the world get hip to good rock records that I had liked, I figured that that "yes" that I had felt would bloom around me inside other people. I figured I'd be one of many people who liked Jimmy Crouse.

After that first single came out in '91, within the same months few months as Nevermind, Loveless, Peng, Dry, and Slanted and Enchanted, there weren't any other Jimmy Crouse recordings until a couple years later when a fanzine in Newark, DE called Yakuza, made by a guy named Dave McGurgan and his friend Chris Rice (who, playing bass, was the only person I ever saw accompany Jimmy Crouse), came out with a CD that included a bunch of Delaware people, and the song "Druthers" was on it. It was only two minutes. I never heard him play it live, but it was perfect. I have listened to and sung it hundreds of times. I still could not pinpoint what it's about, but it's true. One verse that has something to do with resignation, repeated with one-word variations in each iteration.

A year or two later, an ambitious and talented Delaware musician named Tony Goddess, who had moved to Boston and started a band called Papas Fritas, recorded a single of Jimmy Crouse playing two of the songs that were staples of his live sets. Anyone who saw Jimmy play in the early 90s heard him play "Hell to Breakfast." The flip side, "Freak of Nature," was played a lot, too, although to tell you the real truth in live performance it was among the songs that was most harrowing. It was not at all easy to hear him sing that one. For the recording, Tony Goddess dressed them up a little with drums and bass. I guess he had the same idea that people would love the music, too. Those recordings were to have come out along with a cover of Hank Williams' "I Can't Escape From You," which is one of the best songs about heavy-heartedness ever written and was sung magnificently by Jimmy Crouse. It's a shame it's not included here. There was a test pressing of only a handful of copies, but nothing from it was ever actually released until now.

And years past. Decades. No one I knew knew about Jimmy Crouse. But Rich Pell, a Delaware boy, who shared the same experiences of hearing and admiring Jimmy Crouse's playing back then got in touch and started releasing the incredible new work that he has been doing. But without the context of the early material, you might not hear it the same.

And maybe that's what Jimmy Crouse would prefer. I don't know. I never really talked with him. But now you know the seasons I saw this music live through.

There is nothing else like it. I'd love to know that it continues to live.

-Ian Nagoski
July 2019