Bill DeMain - Extended Stay

In May 2010, a record-setting flood hit Nashville, filling the basement of DeMain's condo with over five feet of water. Among his possessions washed away were years worth of personal journals and songwriting notebooks. "I write with a fountain pen, so the few waterlogged notebooks that I retrieved just looked like big Rorschach ink blots," he says.

Four months later, a cigarette butt thrown by a careless neighbour caused a fire that took out DeMain's entire home.

"Between the flood and the fire, I lost about 80% of my stuff," he says. "I was actually home when the fire started, and did manage to escape with my 1937 Martin acoustic, my laptop and some clothes."

There followed thirteen months of what DeMain calls his "bohemian interlude."

"Suddenly, I was living this transient life. I had very little in the way of material stuff." Renting various funky apartments and farm cottages around Nashville, DeMain dealt with a host of oversized insects, mice, rats and even blood-sucking chicken mites.

Thankfully, there was an upside to all this.

"I wrote a lot of songs," says DeMain, "and as the months went by and I was still in limbo waiting for my condo to be rebuilt, I knew I needed a project to take my mind off the whole affair of losing my home. So I thought, "Why not make a record?"
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