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On the 100th anniversary of Edgar Lee Masters' Spoon River Anthology, Merge is reissuing the epic it inspired: Richard Buckner's The Hill. The Hill started in 1996 in an old garage that had been converted to The Ranch Olancha Motel, a dusty place near the mouth of Death Valley, between Lone Pine and Dunmovin, California. Buckner, who was en route to Tucson, Arizona, to record what would become Devotion & Doubt, stayed a week in a room with no phone, no television, carrying his guitar, a four-track recorder, and a copy of Masters' Spoon River Anthology. He tinkered with a few of the book's poems, put them on a cassette, and forgot about it until an acquaintance discovered it in his truck four years later. Beset with writer's block and looking for a distraction, Buckner would find in the tape the spur he needed. Recorded in Edmonton, Alberta, and Tucson, The Hill converts Spoon River poems to music.