"I've made a really valuable association with a gent from Los Angeles, Mr Ben Merlis. I quite admire Ben as a performer – he's a bass player in a pretty lively band, they travel out of LA frequently. And like much of the stuff we're talking about, you have to dig deep to find something of value. I found this through Ben. There's an ambience here, the unsettling presence of impending doom, which is part of the environment that we step into day by day in this contemporary world. It's part of what we have to exist with. 

I was talking with Terry Manning and Joe Hardy from our recording studios in Memphis and we got onto this topic of ambience. There was once a constant struggle to overcome background noise, the hiss of tape passing across the recording head. However, when absolute digital silence came into play, it was very unsettling. It's not in our genetic code. You can enter an anechoic chamber, which eliminates all sound, and very quickly it's so disturbing that you want out."

"""That's when he did all talking songs. He had this pseudonym, Luke the Drifter, but I remember it for 'Beyond The Sunset' and every track was where he sang a little bit, but he talked a lot. The earlier ones that I heard Hank Williams doing were the classic hits that he had, 'Cold Cold Heart' and 'Your Cheating Heart'. This one I came to later. I heard Hank Williams as Luke the Drifter first in America. When I first went to the States in 1965, I was finding albums in the Colony record shop, right in Manhattan. It was the honesty of the songs - they were very well written, the lyrics, which were tremendous. That's what I liked about it and what I still do. The ones were he talks, that's another thing again. He went a step up there: it was great to hear him talk as well as sing. 'I Dreamed About Mama Last Night', that's a great song, just about life, talking and singing."""