My car was packed to the brim with belongings and the feeling of time travel set in as the seasons changed from late summer to early Autumn coasting further into the mountains. The sun feels lower with more jagged terrain; it disappears earlier too. Noise hangs in the air and reverberates through the surrounding valleys. Distant ghostly trains answer each other in diminishing multitudes. There’s a foreign quiet apprehension not quite like those that surface on the prairies.
Coming off a busy summer of café work, a feeling of stagnation set in when the running ceased. There was a new void in my perception of time. Time moves slowly when you can feel every moment, and quickly when you are thinking about the future. For a while, days felt simultaneously slow moment-to-moment, and blazingly fast while contemplating the lack of momentum. The period in between occupations often feels like this to me. The rub between trying to enjoy a hard-earned break and moment of growth with the need to make rent and continue your journey in a new direction inspires an anxiety in me.
In the basement of an Inn along Banff’s Cave Ave, I lived with a few French tourists and a salt-of-the-earth lady from Northern England for a couple of weeks. Aside from those applicable to the kitchen space, there was one rule—you must be quiet, as you live below the Inn guests. I spent my days soaking up my gift of time through reading, making orchestral arrangements of songs, going for long walks, and softly playing the guitar. I portioned a chunk of each day to look through real estate listings and job postings. Most read something like.. “Spacious Room Under Stairs In 14 person Home: 1000/month+Utilities” and “Make Up To 50k a Year, Set Your Own Schedule” for independent cleaners.
The freedom to immerse myself in a less rigid sense of time allowed me to shift gears into the philosophical mindset again, which often begets in me a contemplative musical experience as well. In this period I started my song Shadows (read it here) with a Tennyson quote fresh in my mind, as well as No Trace with my recent revisiting of time dilation and metaphysics.
It’s a song that came out pretty quickly, unlike most others. I had a few guitar ideas and started singing over them. Within two or three short writing sessions, I had the full song just in time to move from the basement suite. Over the next months, I was given the chance to perform it in Banff a few times before the series of moves landing me back in Lethbridge.
By this stage it felt quite settled and I was ready to make an arrangement. It is an unassuming song, which gave me lots of room to play. I started with the origin: solo acoustic guitar. The chord changes suggested to me some woozy, clicky-keyed electric piano, which also acts as the bass in the song. Something about heavily compressing it made it feel more cozy and warm. That warmth suggested to me some ambience. The day I recorded the guitar, it happened to be lively and drizzly outside so I recorded a few rounds of uninterrupted ambience from my bedroom window. I’m not sure what it is, but something about the refreshing chill of rain awakens me. This sound of running water—weather the rain, a waterfall, or even a shower or sink in another room—inspires a state of ataraxia in me.
Around the precipitation and birdsong, the song evolves into something slightly more enveloping. A piano on the left initiates a friendly dialogue with the electric piano, distant reverberant pads swell with the changing dynamic of the song, additional voices emerge and vanish, emphasizing the thoughts of the singer. Percussion joins at the namesake lyric with rhythmic rubbing hands in stereo, as well as a patted loaf of homemade sourdough as a kick drum. The repetitive percussion helps to anchor the new section with the addition of a mellotron cello droning the key’s tonic, E, and creating a pleasant tension in the outro section; the sound to match the dissonance of the parting lyrics “when there’s no time to sit and take it in, you’re living in the past.”
Thank you for reading.
Listen to the song here.
Listen to the album here.