House of the Rising Sun

When I was 10 years old I wanted to learn to play Rachmaninoff's Prelude in C# Minor on the piano. It was such a beautiful and haunting piece that I just felt compelled to learn it. I could not read music though (I still can't), so I painstakingly tried to figure out each note as best as I could. While recording the piano for House of the Rising Sun, I kept hearing the Rachmaninoff piece in my mind and it just seemed to fit in so well with my rendition of the song. So, I decided to highlight a portion of his piece at the closing of the song. It is not the exact version that Sergei Rachmaninoff composed, but rather his version that I tried to emulate at 10 years of age. This beautiful and classic piece, ended up being the foundation and essence of my song as I built my version around it. House of the Rising Sun is a haunting tale of one soul's troubled past, which inevitably leads to a regretful and inescapable future.