In the ’90s, Jad Fair had five favorite bands and songwriters: Daniel Johnston, The Pastels, Sonic Youth, Teenage Fanclub, and Yo La Tengo. It’s a good list, sure, but what’s most remarkable about it is that, in the course of a dozen years or so, Fair made music with all of them in one form or another. In some cases, a kindred spirit recognized one of its own; in most cases, it was because the work Fair had created with his brother, David, in Half Japanese since the ’70s, or before the term indie rock really existed, had inspired a successive cohort that helped to define it. “Anyone who hears that stuff,” Yo La Tengo’s James McNew told The Wire in 2000, “it’ll change their life.” In the same interview, Ira Kaplan remembered hearing the band’s Half Gentlemen/Not Beasts upon its release and being floored. The way Yo La Tengo made music, he said, owed a lot to Jad and David Fair.

Thing is, Jad Fair has been prolific for half a century now, long before the Internet could create a simultaneous and seemingly eternal archive of everything someone with his predilections made. He’s been involved in several hundred titles, at least, many of them out-of-print on tiny labels that do not exist anymore. In fact, one of those collaborations that Fair made in the ’90s—Strange But True, with Yo La Tengo—has been hard to find, despite its stateside release on October 20th 1998, by Matador Records. For the first time, the album is being reissued on vinyl by Joyful Noise and Bar/None.

By the time Fair played a party with Yo La Tengo in the mid-’90s, they were all friends, fans, and collaborators, having worked on or released records together. When Fair suggested they all head into the studio, the trio bit. David Fair had been turning headlines from the checkout-aisle tabloid Weekly World News into short, poignant, and funny narrative poems. He intended to make an illustrated book of them until Jad read a few and suggested they’d actually be perfect songs. In their New Jersey studio and rehearsal space in 1994, Yo La Tengo—working without headphones, so they could hear one another but couldn’t necessarily hear Jad speak and sing—improvised to his visual cues as he delivered these lyrics. They replicated the stratagem two years later in New York, amassing 29 of these improvised story-songs.

The result, Strange But True, is as wonderful, varied, and wild as some enormous lawn of native grasses. Bits of jangle, hardcore, drone, post-punk, acoustic oddity, and even doo-wop frame these tales of a monkey becoming a domestic helper, of a scientist toiling to reinvent chewing gum, of an impatient millionaire fixing potholes with his own stacks of cash. These sessions were so freewheeling that there are two versions of an anecdote about an accidental Baked Alaska called “Clumsy Grandmother Serves Delicious Dessert by Mistake”—one blown-out and squealing, the other as tight as an oddball punk anthem. The drum-and-voice, start-and-stop curio “X-Ray Reveals Doctor Left Wristwatch Inside Patient” is a testament to those visual cues, while “Embarrassed Teen Accidentally Uses Valuable Rare Postage Stamp” is gorgeous and gentle, Fair and the band finding empathy in the shame.

Of the 24 tracks that make up Strange But True, none may be more affecting than “Circus Strongman Runs for PTA President.” With resignation in his voice, Fair tells the tale of “the sword-swallowing circus strongman and his snake-charming tattooed wife,” who have decided to resign from the circuit and retire into hammock-lounging, child-rearing domesticity. It’s a bummer, a pair of freaks leaving their scene. But it’s also, as we learn, a feint, since the family now consists of “his fire-eating fan-dancing daughter and their dog-faced contortionist son.” We are inseparable, turns out, from our eccentricity. “When I started as a musician, I just wanted to sound like myself,” Fair says. “You would think that would be the easiest thing to do, but, for most people, it’s difficult.” Strange But True couldn’t sound more like Jad Fair if it tried. The songs showcase his uncanny range, brilliant humor, and ultra-flexible musicality, bringing us back to a time when indie rock was still free to be as weird and unruly as its makers wanted it to be.