A Hundred Years East From Home
is inspired by
Bad Land: An American Romance 
by Jonathan Raban.

 

I started this project in spring 2009 after experiencing a serious illness.
I had stumbled into a thorny hedgerow and got my leg pierced with thorns all over.
It seemed to be a simple superficial injury.
It was not.

I ended up in intensive care and was lucky to survive.
By chance I carried Jonathan Raban’s book with me when they rushed me to hospital.

For a week they put me on morphine.

While feeling out of space and time I started to read the book.
Melodies came up in my head somehow.
Weeks later back at home I asked Mr Raban for permission to use his book as a source.
That’s how it began.

I had originally planned to release more than one CD, maybe even a boxed set ...
But writing and recording took much more effort and time than I had expected.
After eight years of struggling it felt like the project would never be finished.
I changed my mind, set myself a deadline and released this CD.
Just in case, you never know.

There is more to come.

I still feel I could have done better – but maybe that’s just what you always think.

Thank you to Mr Jonathan Raban for letting me use his book as a source for the lyrics.

Thanks for their help and their friendship to:
Jürgen Berressem, Andreas Burghardt, Hanjo Berressem, Peter Grünebaum and many more.

 

Special thanks to my good friend Richard Melewski for coming over from the islands to sing with me.

 

A very special thanks to my kids Svenja, Björn and Pascal for their support and patience.

 

 

 „Bad Land: An American Romance is a travelogue of Jonathan Raban's research, over a two-year period, into the settlement of southeastern Montana in the early 20th century. The focus of the book is on the least-populated and least-known area of the United States – the badland area between Marmarth, ND and Terry, MT along the route of the Milwaukee Road railroad and the goings on of various settler families who homesteaded in that area. Emigrants came from Britain, Scandinavia, Russia and Germany in search of a new life in the New World. Nowadays, their ruined houses still stand among forlorn fenceposts trailing whiskers of rusty barbed wire in the arid landscape of eastern Montana, dotted with low buttes and scored with dry creek-beds. The settlers attempted to build a hopeful civilization on the prairie, only to see it collapse within little more than a decade during the time of the Dirty Thirties.“
(from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)

 

A NEW YORK TIMES EDITOR'S CHOICE FOR BOOK OF THE YEAR

 

Photos by Lutz Schröder || Cover-Photo: Highway at Lake Tahoe in California | PhotoDune