A country/ragtime/tin pan alley-inspired song about a mysterious Southern man you can't forget. Very piano-forward, and has one of my favorite piano bits on the whole thing. This one is vaguely breakup themed, but it's a fantasy breakup. I've never dated a Charleston man while living in Tennessee hoping to become a Nashville star. I picked Tennessee because it worked with the meter, and I thought that I should pick a Southern state because the piano riff vaguely reminded me of the South. I also like a lot of the imagery associated with the South - magnolia trees and Spanish moss. (I was disappointed to learn recently that there may not actually be Spanish moss in Tennessee, though reports vary on this.)
While I now consider Way Down In Tennessee an important track for Pas Le Second, it actually only acquired this status relatively late. I have few demos and lyrical revisions of it, which suggests that it wasn't really that important to me when recording from 2012-2014. By around 2016, when I first considered re-recording, I think I upgraded its status mentally as I dropped some old tracks from the album to create something more cohesive. I removed electronic tracks and unfinished ones and focused on finished tracks I thought sounded good together - being piano-based or otherwise imitating real instruments. Way Down In Tennessee has an old-timey flair to it and the second half of the verse has one of my favorite chord progressions - F F#dim C Am Dm G C. Very ragtimey!
The song was originally just the chorus and titled 'Sad Chiptune Song,' with the earliest reference being May 26, 2012. On July 3, the name was changed to 'Way Down in Tennessee.' By July 7, 2012 it had most of the lyrics ready as well as an unused bridge. I changed the verses a little at some unspecified points and by 2023 the lyrics were in their final state. I removed a nonsense line about 'working in New York and living in LA' (how is that possible?) that was there mostly for big city vibes~. Vibes are good, but the song has to make some kind of sense for the vibes to reverberate.
Way Down In Tennessee was not released in the original 5-track version of Pas Le Second as I really struggled with the production. There were two different arrangements tried, a slower one and a faster one. I attempted at one point to imitate a slide guitar using pitch bend on a keyboard guitar sample, which was quickly removed. It was also in 6/8 time at one point with an NES synth backing arpeggio (the early version of the album had so many chiptune synths). The song was frustratingly unfinished for a long time until I realized that the beat should be in swing time instead of straight time. I also added a ukulele to give it a more ragtime feel (don't ask how they're related but I swear they are). I did not have a proper pick at that point so I used an old credit card :). Not the best but it was good enough for a background filler.