TIME! (2)

I quit worrying about “Time” late in the songwriting process. I had the perfect intro, the perfect segue from Lonely One Last Time into something beautiful, new, and psychedelic. And the intro was done - the song must be about Time.

And there was the great conceit in writing a song with this name. Besides the bodies we inhabit, there are few things as omnipresent in our lives as time itself. I got lost in my head on this song, in the grand ambition and hubris of taking on the topic of time itself, and confining the discussion to a mere three minutes.

If I said too little, it might communicate that there’s not so much to say about time, or maybe it’s something about which I haven’t thought too deeply. Or, perhaps the greatest elegance would be to say something simple about Time which has never been said before. Something which, if carved into stone, would be meaningful in any era of humanity. No small task - and there are few things which we can say about time for certain except for the simple fact that time passes.

But there is something you may not know, not about time, but about the nature of the technology at our disposal. If I wanted to, I could remix, remaster, rerecord, (or rewrite entirely) any track in my catalog, and reupload it in place of the first one. If I wrote a song about sheep and, one day, decided it would work better if it was a song about goats, or lions, or sandwiches - if I wanted to cut the length in half or put the recording in reverse, recast every musician (including myself) and change the genre to opera, I could replace the recording on every streaming service.

If I pulled that song off streaming, and my drives were corrupted, and I lost the files of those recordings - that song you listened to would cease to exist entirely.

There wouldn’t be anything you could do about it.

And so I quit worrying.

I quit asking the question - is this song ambitious enough? Is it too ambitious? Have I met my ambitions? Have I adequately encapsulated our experience of Time? Do the changes of the verses reflect the seven ages of man? Should the transitions across youth be more firm, from infant to schoolboy to lover to soldier? Is it appropriate that those stages blend together, as our memories do, and that there are no definite markers when we pass from one age to the next?

Because the ways in which we remember things may differ from day to day, so may your experience of this song. Until it is set to some physical media, that is, until it is set in stone, this is how it is and how it will be.