Haunted Country Shack

Written and Recorded in 1994

The idea for the ominous intro can be traced back to a studio session in early 1992. At that time, I was playing in a band called Elegance, which featured a singer, who was not capable to play any instrument. While I was enjoying a casual jam with other mates, playing on the electric piano, the singer suddenly grabbed my guitar and began to provide musically meaning notes for a short while. The session was recorded on a cassette tape and when I discovered that piece a couple of years later, I simply thought it would be interesting to reconstruct the odd moment that happened merely by chance. Whilst the singer’s guitar part was reconstructed almost loyally to what had been originally played there, our parts - the spontaneous jam in E minor - was transformed to a form of short fugue for string quartet and written as a program for the digital sequencer. In terms of music, all the rest was no creation but merely a simple Country thing.

The initial demo of this track was called The Boy’s Piano and the Devil’s Woman, or The Boy, the Intelligence, and the Devil’s Woman. These titles came from the content of the lyric I wrote for this tune, which had a short story that featured some characters like ‘a boy’, ‘the devil’, ‘a woman’ and ‘the intelligence’, a personification of the abstract idea. At that time, I thought the story was concise enough to fit in to such a short tune and was well written, now I rather agree with my band mates back then, who rejected my complacency.

In making this video, I removed my voice parts delivering the unpleasant story and changed the title to a harmless one.