TIME! (1)

TIME! is out today.

Experts in music marketing will tell you that the worst thing you can say about a song is that it’s ‘out today.’ For me to say that TIME! is out, and that it is the second half of Lonely One Last Time, is simply not enough of a story. It would be much wiser to chop the song up into one thousand little clips, each no longer than eight seconds (or three quarters of a sentence), and hope that one tiny piece of the work will eventually be successful, like a finger or a toe striking it big and a surprised audience discovering that there is somehow an entire body attached to that digit.

I greatly prefer telling you it’s out today to the much less palatable option of filming myself as I pretend to fall into a lake and hoping I go viral enough that you find me on a streaming service. I’ve stopped making content in that capacity, and at this point I don’t imagine I will again soon. In my observations online I have noticed that many of the greatest creators of content make memorable videos and forgettable art. They have studied tiktok and the algorithms and lost all sense of the ways in which music itself moves us. In short, they have perfected a different craft.

So I’ll tell you here that TIME! is out today, and I am relieved.

When I started this song I worried about the scope of it, the dumb ambition of creating a song called TIME!, and of trying to distill some idea of time itself into a mere three minutes. I worried over what I could say that had not already been covered by the likes of Stephen Hawking or Saint Augustine. I worried I may not be adequately paying tribute to existing literature on the subject, and wrote versions of this song which adhered to Shakespeare’s Seven Ages of Man. Although some of that movement remains in this version, from the mewling babe (the bells at the start) to the soldier in the cannon’s mouth, adhering to that structure proved unmusical and challenging to listen to. I decided instead to focus on less perceptible changes, changes that were hard to notice as you experienced their passing, but significant if you skipped around to different moments of the song.

But there is one reason that TIME! is out today, and this may be something you don’t know about digital releases: this song can always change. I can release this version today, and, if I so decide, I can upload a new version next week, in German, as a polka, twelve minutes long and played entirely on accordion, and it would replace this version entirely. This TIME! as you now know it would exist only in memory.

I like to think of the work we put out as an effective snapshot of who and what we were in a given moment, a photograph of a person at a specific time. But digital work can always change, and perhaps the truest thing we can say about time is that it changes everything it touches, and when salt and rain and wind wear down a rock face we admire the visible marks of time on its surface. So too will this recording continue to develop and change.

So TIME! is out today, as I understand it, and it may very well be something else tomorrow.

I hope you enjoy it, and I hope you will enjoy what it becomes.

John