Words Falling Slow

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Words Falling Slow – Notes Falling Slow

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Words Falling Slow is a twice weekly blog series written by Michael Timmins in which he writes about the writing, recording, history and inspiration behind some of the songs included in the Notes Falling Slow box set. You can pre-order Notes Falling Slow here. You can listen to a new recording from the box set here.

This song, true to it’s title, slowly drifted together. During a particularly sleepless night I decided to while away the late night hours in my basement with my guitar. In a half daze and in tune with the time of night/morning and in tune with the weather (cold and snowing) I came up with the basic melody and chord structure and the line “this ain’t no depression just notes falling slow, an early snow and notes falling slow”….then I drifted off to sleep, or simply drifted away, and there it sat for awhile.

When I went to the Adirondacks to start the writing process for the One Soul Now album I brought along this scrap of an idea. It had been echoing in my head for a while and I knew that it was an idea desperate to be completed. On my first night at the cabin the song completed itself with the help of a few very talented “friends”. William Shakespeare provided the opening couplet from his Sonnet CXXXVIII (I have always loved those lines) and the brilliant Andre Dubus’ short story A Father’s Story provided the inspiration for the pivotal line “Do I have the strength to bear their passion?”. The rest of the song was carried in on the same cold fall breeze that was teasing the wind chimes that kept me company outside the cabin window.

The song is a meditation on relationships, age and children (the basic themes of the entire box set). It is also a comment on our own music and an answer to all those people who ask why we write such depressing songs…..they’re not depressing they’re just sloooooooow.

 

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Words Falling Slow – Small Swift Birds

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Words Falling Slow is a twice weekly blog series written by Michael Timmins in which he writes about the writing, recording, history and inspiration behind some of the songs included in the Notes Falling Slow box set. You can pre-order Notes Falling Slow here. You can listen to a new recording from the box set here.

Is there a natural phenomenon more phenomenal than the migratory practices of song birds? Can one feel any greater emotion than when holding ones child for the first time? How is it that the very things that matters most to us, the things that at one point in our lives seem unassailable and unshakeable are often the very things that we let disappear from our lives? These are the questions of Small Swift Birds. We humans are truly mysterious beings: as unfathomable, epic and fragile as the natural world around us.

 

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Words Falling Slow – Spiral Down

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Words Falling Slow is a twice weekly blog series written by Michael Timmins in which he writes about the writing, recording, history and inspiration behind some of the songs included in the Notes Falling Slow box set. You can pre-order Notes Falling Slow here. You can listen to a new recording from the box set here.

When I was 17 years old I learnt to fly. I eventually got my commercial license and was heading for a career in aviation when a voice inside me said, “stop, this is not your path”. One of the first things that you are taught when you are getting your license is how to recognize a spiral (basically when you see the earth spinning in your windscreen and getting larger by the second) and, more importantly, how to get out of one. There are standard techniques to employ when recovering from a spiral in an airplane, not so in life. It’s inevitable, it’s written in to our DNA, everyone’s life will end, even those that are closest to us. There is no recovery, the best thing that we can do is make peace with the idea. But doing so is so much more difficult than memorizing; idle power; apply opposite rudder and push the steering column forward.

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Words Falling Slow – I’m So Open

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Words Falling Slow is a twice weekly blog series written by Michael Timmins in which he writes about the writing, recording, history and inspiration behind some of the songs included in the Notes Falling Slow box set. You can pre-order Notes Falling Slow here. You can listen to a new recording from the box set here.

As January 1, 2000 approached, Margo decided that our whole extended family should celebrate the arrival of the new millennium together. She invited us all up to her farm for New Years Eve and we partied like it was 1999. A huge bonfire was lit and we all gathered within its comforting circle of light and warmth as we waited out the final hours of the 20th century and anticipated the arrival of the 21st. There inside this circle were the most important people in my life, and lurking on the edges, in the darkness, was all of our futures, our paths, our fates. It was all at the same time, a terrifically comforting and totally terrifying, moment….perfect fodder for a song. Just outside there waiting/Just outside the circle/Waiting for that finger to point your way/Just keep running/ Just keep running.

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Words Falling Slow – Simon Keeper

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Words Falling Slow is a twice weekly blog series written by Michael Timmins in which he writes about the writing, recording, history and inspiration behind some of the songs included in the Notes Falling Slow box set. You can pre-order Notes Falling Slow here. You can listen to a new recording from the box set here.

This song was written a few years before the 2008 Financial Crisis that almost bankrupted us all, nevertheless I think it serves as a good allegory for those times. I still find it disturbing that our institutions and attitudes weren’t forever changed by that near miss. I think those in involved and in charge were so freaked out and embarrassed by what happened that instead of using it as a lesson to right our economy and get it back on a more fair and equitable footing, they under-played the crisis and lost a chance to make a short term loss in to a long term gain.

I wrote this song while writing the songs that became the Open album. I wanted to write a character driven song, so I invented Simon Keeper: man of slightly dubious character who falls through the cracks of his own making and loses all that he had built up, or more accurately, accumulated, in his 54 years. By the end of the song he has found God, but not redemption…the God that he has found is one that can be used for personal profit and advancement….see what I mean…a good allegory for our life and times.

Linford Detweiler of Over The Rhine plays organ on this song….a wonderful, spooky part.

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Words Falling Slow – So They Say

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Words Falling Slow is a twice weekly blog series written by Michael Timmins in which he writes about the writing, recording, history and inspiration behind some of the songs included in the Notes Falling Slow box set. You can pre-order Notes Falling Slow here. You can listen to a new recording from the box set here.

One of the things that has always intrigued me, bedeviled me, fascinated me and therefore inspired me, is the way that couples communicate, or more accurately, miss-communicate; the way that one person says one thing and the other hears something completely different; the way that my interpretation of an event is completely different from your interpretation of the exact same event. We use language to define and share our perception of the world around us, but that perception is so often warped by the words we use or, more importantly, by how the listener interprets those words. William Burroughs famously said that “language is a virus from outer space”… I think anyone that has ever been in a long-term, committed relationship would agree.

This song was originally written during the making of At The End Of Paths Taken, but we never found the right groove for it and it also didn’t fit the albums overarching theme as tightly as we would have liked. For Notes Falling Slow we pulled it out again and immediately locked in to a deep, mid-tempo groove, which allowed Margo to find her way in to the song. Joby Baker added some, as usual, tasty piano and organ to the song. Joby played a huge part in creating At The End Of Paths Taken, adding some crucial production ideas and mixing about half of the songs on the album.

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Words Falling Slow – Follower II

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Words Falling Slow is a twice weekly blog series written by Michael Timmins in which he writes about the writing, recording, history and inspiration behind some of the songs included in the Notes Falling Slow box set. You can pre-order Notes Falling Slow here. You can listen to a new recording from the box set here.

When I was writing At The End Of Paths Taken I not only set myself the challenge of writing along a single theme (see the blog entry for Brand New World), but I also decided that I wouldn’t use any standard tunings or tunings that I was overly familiar with. I wanted to force myself out of old habits and approach my instrument with a fresh perspective. One of my favourite tunings was the one that I came up with for Follower II: C A D A A E….I love the way it chimes and drones all in the same stroke. The recording of the song was also crowned by the brilliant string arrangement by our friend and collaborator Henry Kucharzyck.

Follower II also happens to be one of my favourite songs on the album.. It was inspired by the Seamus Heaney poem, Follower, a meditation on the complexity and ever-changing dynamic of the father/son relationship. The song contains specific memories that I have of my father from when I was a young boy, the way he would jingle the change in his pockets and the spell he would cast over us as he told his stories about flying bush planes in northern Quebec. Its’ chorus references a very vivid memory that I still cherish of a moment from one of our annual fishing trips; we were out in the middle of the lake, it was dusk and the rain began to fall and rather than heading in to shore and shelter, he predicted that the brown trout, that we were angling for, would now begin to bite and sure enough they did. The song then moves to my perspective as a father, peeking in on my young son as he sleeps: wondering, worrying, anticipating what the future has in store for him….and so it goes, and so it goes…

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Words Falling Slow – Thousand Year Prayer

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Words Falling Slow is a twice weekly blog series written by Michael Timmins in which he writes about the writing, recording, history and inspiration behind some of the songs included in the Notes Falling Slow box set. You can pre-order Notes Falling Slow here. You can listen to a new recording from the box set here.

When it comes to my own lyrics, this is one of my personal favourites. It was written on the eve of the new millennium, which was a time of taking stock on a personal and global level. We didn’t know how turbulent the decade to come was going to be, but there was anxiety in the air. My wife and I had a two year old underfoot, a second child on the way and the band had just left the corporate world and was heading out on an independent path. It was a time to count ones blessings and to whisper a quiet prayer.

The opening chords to this song (Fmaj7th and Cmaj7th) are my go-to 70’s Southern California singer-songwriter vibe. Neil Young uses them a lot on those classic early 70’s albums. But the way the melody makes it’s way through the F, Em7, Fm, Am chord progression is something that I have always been proud of. It’s a song about ecology, Jimi Hendrix, my daughter, my wife….it’s a song written on the precipice of the great unknown, best summed up by the lines, “Here we all are at the start of another thousand years / All those love stories yet to be told”….I’ve always loved that line, because it speaks of promise and possibilities.

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Words Falling Slow – He Will Call You Baby

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Words Falling Slow is a twice weekly blog series written by Michael Timmins in which he writes about the writing, recording, history and inspiration behind some of the songs included in the Notes Falling Slow box set. You can pre-order Notes Falling Slow here. You can listen to a new recording from the box set here.

“He will call you baby”. I had that line scribbled in my notebook for years. I don’t remember where it came from. I always thought that it was a provocative opening line, but I could never figure out what came next or what the song would be about. Time, life, circumstance, experience helped me flesh it out…..in the end it kind of wrote itself.

It’s a song about all the weird games we play with the ones we love. The subconscious and conscious games that play out in any long term relationship. It’s also about the loneliness and the sadness inherent in any great love. A happy little ditty.

Initially we approached this song acoustically, with Jeff Bird on acoustic bass and Jaro Czerwinec on accordion. But as the recording progressed we started to abandon the acoustic approach and this song went in a more bluesy, electric direction. The version that we ended up using on One Soul Now was actually a rehearsal version of the song (always roll tape!) captured when we were all learning the songs’ structure and figuring out our parts. This type of groove is always best when no one is really thinking about it. Nice and loose with lots and lots of deep breathing. I love the way it almost stops in the middle of the solo and Pete’s tom-drum fill resuscitates it. Margo’s vocal is perfect. When I played this song for Jeff Wolpert, our mixer, he said, “man….nobody plays that slow”. We do and we’re proud of it.

It’s still one of my favourite songs to play live.

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Words Falling Slow – Brand New World

 

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Words Falling Slow is a twice weekly blog series written by Michael Timmins in which he writes about the writing, recording, history and inspiration behind some of the songs included in the Notes Falling Slow box set. You can pre-order Notes Falling Slow here. You can listen to a new recording from the box set here.

In 2006 I had three children all under the age of ten. Life was chaotic, busy, noisy and, more often than not, stressful. The band was entering its 20th year and we were all scrambling to keep as many balls in the air as humanly possible, juggling was a way of life. That year I set out to write a new album and, for the first time, I decided to focus my writing along a single (albeit broad) theme: family. Family, not just from the perspective of parenthood, but also from son to father, husband to wife, generation to generation. The result was At The End Of Paths Taken.

Brand New World is the opening track to the album and the intent was for it to lay the groundwork for the album’s concept. Here was a set of songs about the confusion, frustration, delight and heartbreak of family relationships. Twenty years earlier I was single, childless, and my only concern was music and the band that I was forming, suddenly I found myself (like a lot of you) in this brand new world of complicated and labyrinthine relationships and my head, more often than not, was spinning….and occasionally my heart went missing.

 

 

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