The Hammond Song - New recording performed by Simon and the Astronauts, featuring Terre Roche and Rachel Haden

THE HAMMOND SONG

   In 1975 my older sister Maggie and I released our first album, “Seductive Reasoning”, produced in part by Paul Simon who had taken us under his wing.  The record took a year and a half to make. We worked with some of the best musicians in the business, basically the ones on Paul Simon’s records of the time.  But we were different from all of them. We had no formal music training, having learned our guitar chords from a TV show “Folk Guitar With Laura Weber”.  Maggie wrote all our songs, an art she had an uncanny talent for early on. “Seductive Reasoning”  was released on Columbia Records. By the time it came out we were exhausted and intimidated by the demands of the music business. We left our home in New York City and retreated to a  town in rural Louisiana named Hammond, where we got waitress jobs and lived in a Kung Fu Temple, studying the Eastern arts of Tai Chi, yoga, and meditation.

   During our time at the Kung Fu Temple, Maggie and I hardly ever played music. But she wrote one song, “The Hammond Song” while we were living that life. 

   Eventually we moved back to New York and formed a trio with our younger sister which became The Roches. “The Hammond Song” was the first song in our repertoire as a trio. It went on to become the most popular Roches’ song with many people covering it over the years.

   Rachel Haden wrote to me some years ago to say The Roches had been an influence on her family’s group The Haden Triplets. She decided to do a cover of “The Hammond Song” and asked me to sing on it with her.  That’s how this recording came about. I’ve always thought of the song as a conversation between a father and a daughter.  I was 26 when I first sang it. Now, at age 71, I get to sing from the older person’s point of view.  I had the freedom to sing it how I feel it now, with my lower badass alto voice. And Rachel provides the younger person’s voice with her beautiful soprano. This is a unique recording that took 50 years to make. Thanks Rachel for the cool idea! And to Simon Wells for releasing it on his album.

Terre Roche
Thanksgiving Day, 2024
St. John, US Virgin Islands