Elyse - Elyse (1968) (2001)

Elyse J. Weinberg (October 25, 1945 – February 20, 2020) was a Canadian-American singer-songwriter. In later life she used the name Cori Bishop.

Elyse Weinberg, a late '60s singer-songwriter and guitarist once lost to time and later rediscovered by crate-diggers, died Feb. 20 in Ashland, Ore., after battling lung cancer. The news was confirmed to NPR through both her label, Numero Group, and close friend, Satya Alcorn. She was 74.

In 1968, Weinberg released Elyse, a psychedelic and ramshackle folk-rock record that followed a tangled dream-logic of melody and tempo, led by a raspy voice floating in its rhizomatic orbit. A little over three decades later, Elf Power's Andrew Rieger found a copy of the the record in a dollar bin; entranced by (and likely finding a twisted, Elephant 6-style camaraderie within) its charms, Rieger and his bandmate, Laura Carter, reached out to Weinberg and subsequently reissued the album on Orange Twin Records in 2001.

For a time, that reissue — its artwork scanned from a worn LP, featuring a couple of extra songs and little context otherwise — was all we knew about Elyse Weinberg. But the mystery, as it often does, helped her mystic-music: As word spread, artists like Vetiver, Dinosaur Jr. and Courtney Barnett all covered "Houses." (Neil Young played on the original; he plugged directly into the board for some gnarly guitar shred, but was uncredited on the reissue's back cover.)