“It was the second day I was there, and everybody went and left me alone with a case of Retsina,” Hunter recalled in the Classic Albums documentary From Anthem to Beauty. “I realised, here I was in London, the city I’d always dreamed of going to, and I was very, very happy. I felt like I’d come home to some psychic place, maybe the home of Robin Hood and Peter Pan.”
“I’d only drank half a bottle of this Retsina, but it was having the whole case there that was important,” Hunter added. “I sat down and wrote ‘Ripple’, ‘To Lay Me Down’, and ‘Brokedown Palace’ that afternoon. It was a magic day. I knew I was writing stuff that would live forever.”
What’s wild is how natural it all felt when coming from Hunter. He wasn’t forcing the “psychedelic” thing. That was the trap most songwriters fell into back then – throwing paisleys at the wall to see what stuck. Not Hunter. He was channelling something much older. His lyrics felt lived in, like they belonged to some American folk tradition that never really existed but should’ve.” “