Which Arthur Russell Are We Getting On 'Iowa Dream'?

"I'm a wonder boy / I can't do nothing," the late avant-pop artist Arthur Russell laments on "Wonder Boy," amid stop-and-go piano and plonky vibraphone. "The poster was nailed to a tree and somebody tore it down / Bits of paper nailed to a tree — that's all I found." In part because his legacy was never fully in his own control, the image — taken from the first song of a new album — lives on as an inwardly critical fantasy, rather than the self-fulfilling prophecy it nearly became.

Russell died a relatively obscure figure — though well-known in Downtown New York's experimental music scene — in 1992, at age 40, of complications related to HIV-AIDS. Ever the perfectionist, Russell's inability to finish songs, and the genre-agnostic strangeness of much of that music, resulted in the release of just a few full-length albums under his own name — and — during his lifetime. His rise to celebrated cult musician has largely occurred over the last 16 years, buoyed by a stream of compilation albums assembled from the deep well is the newest addition to Russell's ever-lengthening list of afterlife releases, a characteristically wide-ranging collection, but with a particular focus on an oft-overlooked aspect of Russell: the aspiring '70s pop star.