A note from Ian:
Country House was the synthesis of two major experiences in my life:
1. In 2008, I accepted a job working as a live-in assistant to Reynolds Price, an acclaimed author and my favorite professor at Duke. The insight and intimacy of that experience introduced an idea about the mysterious lives being lived behind every candle-lit window you see driving out on a country road. The families, struggles, joys, and passages of life unfolding across interconnected chapters in concentric books, of which we will only ever get the slightest glimpses. Having been plunged into someone else’s day-to-day and having to surrender myself to it, I wanted to reflect and integrate that overwhelm into a song.
2. Simultaneously, my paternal grandfather passed away and my family was summoned to Baltimore for the funeral. The family dynamics within the Hölljes clan are very complex and carry a gothic anachronistic quality that gave me the sense of experiencing something sacred, strange and ancient (with plenty of absurdity and humor to boot) and I thought about how much better I had come to know Reynolds than I had this man whose blood I carried in my veins and who was now gone from the earth.
These were big moments for a 23-year old and I felt a need to document the ephemeral quality of life that lived at the heart of my observations of both. The challenging gift of having proximity to lives that are nearing their end when you’re still young is that it encourages one to attempt to adopt a view of their own life from the perspective of looking back. But life is a journey and one that we only control so much, so trying to render the lightning bolt of your own existence from both ends of the charge is impossible. I’m still grappling with this song and the honest lonesomeness of that realization.