Brooklyn singer-songwriter Cynthia Hopkins was motivated to write her new piece, Accidental Nostalgia: An Operetta on the Pros and Cons of Amnesia because she suffered from amnesia as a child after her mother’s death from cancer. Accompanied by her live band Gloria Deluxe, Hopkins brings her breakthrough performance to On the Boards for three nights, June 3-5, 2004, on the heels of its March premiere at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn. Described by the Washington Post as "Part alt-country, part Lou Reed, part Patti Smith, part performance artist," OBIE and Bessie Award-winner Hopkins wrote the songs for Big Dance Theater's Antigone, presented in February of 2003 at OtB. She formed her band, Gloria Deluxe, in 1999 (the band is named after her accordion). Hopkins says her musical influences include Woody Guthrie, the Velvet Underground, Robert Johnson, Shawn Colvin, and Hank Williams.

Accidental Nostalgia is a three-act tale of a woman named Cameron Seymour, claiming to be a neurologist specializing in the memory function of the brain and Psychogenic Amnesia. Cameron carelessly adopts herself as a subject of study, focusing on chunks of her childhood that she cannot seem to recollect. In an attempt to jog her memory, she journeys to her childhood home and discovers that she is wanted for her father's murder, or rather his "mysterious disappearance". She narrowly escapes the hometown police and decides that she prefers “Mystery Without the Murder” (the title of a song in the piece) and will choose to remember a different past while converging with a decidedly different future. Hopkins says the piece owes a lot to the cult television shows like “Twin Peaks” and “The Singing Detective.”

The ideas [in Accidental Nostalgia] are explored through a plot that is something like a Loretta Lynn album as reimagined [sic] by, say, Kurt Weill and William S. Burroughs, with a good dose of Freud mixed in. - Randy Kennedy, The New York Times