Ghostown accordeon song The backstory
This is the story of how the song Accordéon came into being.
It started back in 2005 I had made a backing track using a synth accordion on the Yamaha Motif, the first verse was actually written for another instrumental that I’d made but it fitted well with this one, every time I played it live it went down well, it was a simple groove and I didn’t consider it to be as accomplished as some of the other songs at the time, I liked the idea of using the accordion and had already made a song based on accordion samples, yet it never got properly released and has now disappeared (Reddog if anyone has a copy?).
In 2008 my brother Lewis came to visit with his accordion and I asked him if he could redo the keyboard parts to which he agreed, this vastly improved the sound of the song with samples of a real accordion, he then went on to improvise a few melody parts which I swiftly sampled and chopped up, thanks to Lewis the song now had a more unique sound to it.
Lewis is a highly accomplished multi instrumentalist musician and composer who specialises in Eastern European music.
Lewis Powell-Reid
For the second verse I again recycled some lyrics I’d written for another song, hence the completely different rhyme patterns.
I liked the idea of havinga long intro part to the song with just vocals and accordion before the beat came in, this had particularly gone down well live.
The song is made up of 3 parts, with the main riff in the first part, an instrumental second part, and then a break derived third part.
DJ Kirsa added some scratches in-between the verses.
In 2008 while we were putting together the album Reflectionz with DJ Kirsa and Baptizer, there were many songs that we had worked on intensely as a trio, with distinct guitar and scratch parts, (Ghostown, Reflections, White Coats etc) as a result “Accordéon” didn’t really fit in, it also didn’t seem to have the depth of the other songs, so I ended up putting it as the last track on the album, a kind of bonus track, it even had silence added to the end and a snippet of the end of a concert as the last sounds of the album.
These were the days when people listened to CDs and whole albums, this was just before streaming became a thing, and that bit of silence at the end of the track could have been a really bad idea for it to work on playlists, but at the time that wasn’t an issue.
Although other songs from the album went on to be used in a few TV and video productions, Accordéon was the song that people went crazy for every time we performed it live.
It went on to be the most popular song ever, getting 10 times as many plays as any of the other songs on the album. And that was reapeated on every platform, it’s the top song on Spotify, Deezer, Apple, Soundcloud and Youtube, today it may have amassed up to 2 million plays.
In 2020 I decided to do instrumental versions of a lot of my songs, including Accordion, it was remixed and revamped, with new scratches from DJ Kirsa.
In 2024 I released a shorter version of Accordéon in order to be more favorable for playlists and also to get into the new Spotify Discovery Mode algorithm
It has already knocked up 60k plays in a year, and is quietly becoming more listened to than the original.
Now the original composition is around 18 years old and is still being discovered by people today.
To this day I still don’t know why people like this song in particular so much, so if you have any insights please share, why is Accordéon special to you?
