[See post to listen to audio]

This band is one of my all time favorites. They’re called “The Books” and the band consists of two guys, Nick Zammuto and Paul de Jong. As far as I’m concerned their geniuses. They’re music is strangely experimental incorporating found sounds, field recordings, movie clips and old records into a pulsing tapestry of music written by the duo. Zammuto has described their style as “collage music.” I think this applies very well.

So as I’m reading about these guys I come across the name of a guest vocalist, Anne Doerner. I look her up. I see a photo. I’m all like, that chick looks familiar. I keep reading about the Books. I see something about their first album, my favorite and the source of this track, was recorded in the basement of a hostel in North Carolina, near Asheville, where Zammuto worked after hiking the Appalachian Trail.

Wait, do what? Elmer’s place? Anne? Wait. Huh?

So I hit the reference. Takes me to some magazine’s site where there’s an interview. Okay, yeah, he says something about a hostel in North Carolina.

Next reference… Bingo.

So when I was backpacking the AT years ago, I guess about a year after Thought for Food came out, I got off the trail in Hot Springs, North Carolina. My friend and I stayed in this hiker’s hostel there that was run by an ex Methodist minister named Elmer. The Sunnybank Inn is what it was called. It was an old Victorian style house that he also used as a bed and breakfast. He had an organic farm down the road and there was a great little country cookin’ cafe across the street. Elmer was really interesting. I got the feeling he had been all over the place, seen much and done some crazy shit. He had that old, lost book kinda feeling. While I was there, a woman named Anne was living there with a guy named Nick, who was out of town.

I didn’t even discover The Books until a few years later.

Crazy.