FFO: Numero's variety of unearthed country rock gems (like their Wayfaring Strangers: Cosmic American Music compilation from 2016)

From Numero: Sometimes, simply saying “I love you” isn’t an available option. Sometimes, because it’s both forbidden and impossible, a person’s feelings go unexpressed and are left to gnaw away from the inside. That was the case for Charles K. Brown, who’d fallen for one of the other men in his country-rock band Sleepy Creek, just as they were starting to gain a following in the late 1970s. In the depths of his longing, he sat down and wrote “I Just Want to Talk to You,” as pure and lovely a statement about unrequited love as any before or since, and one that still hits just as hard nearly 50 years later.
“What I was trying to say was, ‘I wish I could tell you how I feel about you,’” Brown would explain, decades later. “But at that age, I wasn’t ready to accept myself.” Amid his own growing awareness that he was attracted to men and desired relationships with them, Charles Brown’s circumstances at the time wouldn’t permit him to explore and live openly. It was a recipe for hurt. “When you put all your eggs in that basket, and you know deep down it’s not going to happen like that,” Brown said, “it’s a lot of pain.”
Brown finally worked up the nerve to play “I Just Want to Talk to You” for the man he’d written it about. In response, he got either cluelessness or some form of a cruel tease. “He said, ‘If you sang to me like that and you were a girl, I would be gone,’” Brown recalled. “He said that to me. And that made me fall in love more.”

What we say: The moment I heard the title track earworm I Just Want to Talk to You I knew I was done for. Who doesn’t love a song made for longing by the longing? The rest of this collection of songs falls right in line with the themes of desire and longing so if you’re in a crush stranglehold, this might be the record you’ve been looking for. - K