HEADSTONE, another one of Maximilian Hecker’s "Wretched Love Songs", is (after "Untouchable" from 2015) already his second duet with American singer-songwriter Rachael Yamagata, this extraordinary woman who is leading a secluded life in a cabin out in the woods of Upstate New York, whose soulful, breathy voice makes your flesh crawl, who curiously is of American, Japanese, Italian and German ancestry and who Hecker had met and befriended at a joint concert at Sejong Center for the Performing Arts in Seoul in January 2011. The two artists, both born in 1977, share not only a huge following in East Asia, they also feel to be kindred spirits, since both tend to be jokesters in their private life, however, when it comes to their musical and poetic expression, they’re rather drawn to their dark sides, their sorrowfulness and melancholy. Yamagata and Hecker have joined a tongue-in-cheek competition of which of them is "the most miserable". There’s no winner to date. In terms of lyrics, HEADSTONE might sound like a classic Maximilian Hecker song, having chosen the morbid imagery of the cemetery in order to portray the petty situation of someone futilely trying to gain his partner’s recognition and empathy, but when it comes to the sound of HEADSTONE, Hecker seems to venture out into previously unknown territory, namely Rachael Yamagata’s truly American, partly country music inspired world; one might even conjecture that HEADSTONE had been written by his half-Japanese duet partner. However, Hecker likes to point out that he has not only written HEADSTONE, but even dreamed most of the song's chord sequence and melody during a stay of his at an East German youth hostel – which, in a sense, could be seen as his equivalent to Yamagata’s hippie-like cabin in the woods. Hence, HEADSTONE is definitely inspired by Rachael Yamagata’s work and might even be Maximilian Hecker’s secret artistic declaration of love to his, how he calls her, "favorite female singer".