Frank Kogan

*Not to mention Girls On Fire and Your Mom Too (go here and search "Leslie").

**Is "isolate" in common usage in this way, as a noun for an isolated individual? It should be. "Loner" doesn't capture the idea, and I'm not finding more apt synonyms over at Merriam-Webster. Dictionary.com gives us "a person, thing, or group that is set apart or isolated, as for purposes of study," and "Psychology. a person, often shy or lacking in social skills, who avoids the company of others and has no friends within a group." More useful might be the idea of "language isolates" (Wikip gives Basque, Korean, Ainu, and Burushaski as examples). Obviously those languages came from somewhere, but each seems to have no ancestor in common with any other language. I'd be less stringent in my standards for individual artistic or musical isolates, since of course such people will necessarily draw on the culture around them. There's nothing else for them to draw on. The question would be how consistently they're going their own way, being unwilling or unable to reconnect with the streams, substreams, sidestreams, and counterstreams around them.