origin story

In 2008, I walked away from a budding career as a songwriter in the Bay Area. Maria and I had a newborn daughter and a two year old son, and Athens Georgia seemed like a great place for her to take a break as the breadwinner and let me go full bore as a touring sideman with some carpentry on the side. The house we had bought sight unseen, a rambling funky victorian nestled in a leafy old corner of town, was in reality a maze of tenements with crumbling walls, a few space heaters and a camping stove. We had to stay with friends for a month while I did my best to right a sinking ship. Maria quickly realized she needed to go back to work as I took care of the kids and the house. The next few years were touch and go, but life in Athens was everything it wasn't in Oakland. Impromptu porch hangs, warm nights walking to rock shows, and kids running around the neighborhood. 

On a whim one Halloween, I constructed a miniature haunted house in the decrepit shed in our backyard and invited the neighborhood to a lo-fi creep show. Desperate for background music, I enlisted local guitar wizard Dan Nettles (Kenosha Kid) and neighbors Joe Rowe (drummer for the Glands) and Jacob Morris (Vic Chesnutt, Patterson Hood) to flesh out the jangly, spectral fragments I'd been demo-ing late nights after waiting tables. The songs sprang to life. The sleepy, folky soul I had been mining in the Bay Area was all but gone and replaced with edgy, pulsing gothic soundscapes. I was a musician again and finally an Athenian. We were provisionally christened the Haunted Shed Band. It was such a bad yet authentic name that anything else I considered seemed hopelessly pretentious. In a fever I booked some studio time with Drew Vandenberg (Of Montreal, Toro Y Moi) at David Barbe's studio Chase Park Transduction and two days of all-business tracking ensued.  The tracks were promptly abandoned as I returned to stabilizing our home, parenting and waiting tables at 5&10.

A year later, Jason Huffer, whom I barely knew as a Wizard of Oz-type doing fabulous light shows around town, offered to help me release a Haunted Shed EP from the Chase Park sessions. With his pestering I pulled some of my mouldering gear from the basement and started listening to what we had done. I learned ProTools and started mixing. It was slow...real slow, but for all the right reasons. The songs had a mood and energy I wanted to protect. I had to make room for Dan's spellbinding lead guitars. I tried replacing my scratch vocals but mostly failed. “Impending Machines” was my first breakthrough mix. I booked a mastering session to keep my nose to the grindstone. Joe Rowe suggested I send the songs to New West Records owner George Fontaine Sr. and a few days later I was on the phone with George artfully explaining how a 50 year old father of two was a great bet as an emerging indie rock artist. George was game but New West was clogged with releases for at least a year so Strolling Bones Records was born with Haunted Shed's Faltering Light as release number 001.

-Etienne de Rocher, 2020