Orphaned in Northern Ireland at a young age, Terry O’Hara was sent to a distant aunt’s residence on the outskirts of Galway Town. Though she was an alcoholic and floozy, she loved music and went through musicians like the whiskey. She often had musician boyfriends to the ramshackle house, and O’Hara would come in from the fields to try his hand at all sorts of instruments.

After the death of his aunt, and following a series of low-paying, arduous jobs full of back-breaking consciousness, O’Hara found himself in Pittsburgh, yet he was aloof from the tight-knit music scene, strangely dominated by pop music and metal. Nationwide, men and women with beards and high end flannel shirts took up guitars and glockenspiels and sang epic harmonies involving epiphanies, redemption, and triumph. Bands sprouted up with animal names like Bear and Deer. Pop music responded to and reflected an inevitable cultural shift towards alienation and superfluity with catchy choruses and vacuous smiles.

Meanwhile, O’Hara, ever engrossed in banalities, was victimized in a brutal mugging while collaborating with unknown street artists in Baltimore, and given less than a month to live by ER physicians--it was inaccurately reported in the local paper that he had died. His convalescence was spent reading Sherwood Anderson, disabling televisions, shaking anxiety, and experimenting with minor chord folk songs. Struck dumb by the falsities in his life, like the recording of music versus simply playing guitar under a telephone pole, and feeling death was tracking him down, O’Hara, hyper-aware of the cliche, rented a dilapidated shack in northern, rural Pennsylvania to escape the tedium of everyday existence and play music most of the time, except to do menial jobs for his curious, rustic, and salt of the earth neighbors. This was one of the few times O’Hara felt embraced by life as he was drawn into the interior of the seasons and of words and music. Locals would stop by unannounced, often at strange hours, to catch a glimpse of this unkempt recluse who seemed absorbed in vague dreams.

The second album from Summer-Winter, Bewildered, was feverishly written in a week during dreamlike spells of insomnia.