This song is all about the cycles and rhythms of life. Being a parent, working full-time, and that’s just life without the play-dates, after-school activities, special events, the meetings, the family functions, etc. I was hyper-aware of the movement of time, because it wasn’t until the end of the day that I could sit down in the basement and create in my studio. I was producing records for other people, and when I played the co-producer the music that I was working on, he said I sounded tired, which, of course, I was.
I had studied astrology for the better part of my life, and I had become aware of other cycles too. We’re all aware of the cycle of the sun. Not just the day and the night, but the seasons and years. Some folks are attuned to the cycles of the moon. I would argue that those people are either sensitive to the moon or they are making an effort to align with nature’s rhythms. The planets affect the Earth’s motion, and we’re along for the ride. Mercury sticks close to the sun, and you only know it’s there when it goes retrograde and seems to pull away from the sun. Our ancestors paid close attention to these cycles, and empires across the world were governed by rulers who paid close attention to what the planets were doing.
Of course, today we fight against these cycles. We use lighting to stay up later. Our ancestors got way more sleep than we do. We throw daylight savings in there just to mess with our circadian rhythms twice a year. We get the years right, but the way we divide them (weeks and months) doesn’t correspond to anything natural. I mean, the month is loosely based on the orbit of the moon around the sun (27.3 days or 29.5, depending on how you calculate). Either way, you can’t divide the year into equal lunar months without having a few extra days.
As you can see, it’s very tricky to subdivide the year without having leftover years. If you think that’s bad, consider that September was so named by the Romans because it was their seventh month (October was the eighth, and so on). Time is unruly and it doesn’t line up in the way that people who make calendars would like. Birthdays are pretty consistent, not that we often celebrate our birthdays on our birthdays, right? We usually round to the nearest weekend if we’re truly celebrating.
I have been exploring astrology for decades, and its natural rhythms make a lot more sense to me, but the world is trying to impose an artificial rhythm the sole focus of which is productivity. The primary question is: how many units can we produce in a set amount of time? There is an erroneous belief here that efficiency has no trade-offs. Economists will say that efficiency is how we create more with the same inputs, but in my experience, the more effective you become, the less reflective you are. You can’t keep producing and reflect on what you are doing. To be productive, you have to be single-mindedly focused on the task at hand. That leads to Nazi death camps, a perfect example of efficiency divorced from reflection. Our entire civilization at present keeps pushing to create more and more growth; more and more GDP, but are we better off than our well-rested ancestors if we don’t have time to spend with our family?
The motions of the planets affect our planet, and while we might not notice these impacts every day, these cycles have been going on for billions of years as life on Earth evolved. While scientists will acknowledge the impact of the motion of the planets on things like climate cycles, they stop short of granting these motions any impact on biology. Part of that may be the result of misunderstanding the claims of astrology.
Some folks think that astrology suggests that Neptune being in the sign of Aquarius causes specific events to happen on Earth, which sounds vaguely ridiculous, but the Zodiac is nothing more than a clock face, which ticks off the hours of a powerfully complex clock. Does the motion of the minute hand on a clock determine our actions? When the minute hand hits five, is that why we leave work? That would be a ridiculous proposition. We are attuned to the clock and programmed to behave according to its dictates, but the clock itself is doing nothing more than subdividing time. That’s what the planets do, but on a deeper and cosmic level.
We musicians have another view on time. Maybe “view” is the wrong word. We feel time. We feel time signatures and beats per minute, both ways of subdividing time. My friend, Brian Gager, used to say that musicians create time machines, which I have come to agree with. This song is a time machine on many levels.
I’d love to tell you more about how and when I wrote this song, but I was caught up in the patterns of my life to a point where I didn’t have the time to reflect. I don’t recall the specific inspiration, but I can feel the cry emanating from the lyrics, and it continues to resonate in my life today. It’s a common occurrence. When I was much younger, and I began to make choices about my songwriting, I decided to create songs that exhibited a degree of timelessness. At least, that’s how I thought of it then, but now I understand that I wanted to create songs that could withstand the test of time. Growing up in the 80s, I spent more time listening to music that had been created decades earlier. What I realize now is that time has filtered out much of the music that had been made in the sixties. Not every song written back then was good; it’s just that people kept listening to the ones that transcended their time.
As far as the recording of this song, let us begin with the timekeepers. When I first started recording this album, I didn’t have the capability to record drums. I used to program fake drums, so I built the other parts that I could record on top. It was very time-consuming, because you have to decide exactly what the drum is doing for every beat in a way that drummers don’t actually do. Being in a hurry, I switched to a drum loop, which runs through the song. Layered on top of that are drums (Sam Yost) and congas (Steve Sizemore). I love that there are two humans playing alongside a machine to lay the foundation of this song.
The entire song was recorded in bits and pieces over many years. I had been playing with the Louisville Navigators for only a couple of months when Glen Howerton asked me when I would drag them into the studio. This album was the most nearly complete, so I began layering them on after the fact. I overdubbed Tonya Buckler singing backing vocals. Actually, there are four Tonyas. Woody Woodmansee layered some keys- and a killer solo. Mike Snowden came in and shredded his guitar solos in not much more time than it takes to listen to them. Throughout most of this process, I had fake horns playing an arrangement I was very happy with, but it didn’t really gel until the boys in Small Batch Brass came and gave it life.