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.
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.
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.
I don’t know if you have ever been to an IKEA, but chances are that you have. It’s an intimidating place filled with couples fighting and kids having melt downs. Customers are ferried along a retail River Styx with infinite temptations along each river bank as they makes their way from the entrance, through the store, to the check out counter. I don’t care what you’ve come for, you always end up with more in your cart than you had planned and 80% of the stuff you purchase, you will never use or won’t fit the particular application that you bought it for. We have an IKEA closet in our house where all of the Kvors and Sweegars and Ardvars are stored, never to be used or thought of again. The company also has a neat trick of leaving some essential assemblage piece out of the box, so you are forced to return to the store and start the whole journey again. The parking lot, which is, by course, huge, is where one steels oneself for the experience. Sometimes the couple never makes it in to the store.
I think this is the saddest song that I have ever written. There are few things as devastating as the blunt force impact of having the words “I don’t think I love you anymore” thrust at you. But I love the imagery in this song: the idea of words being spoken in a cold car, the breath that is expelling those words visible as water vapour, floating in the cold air and eventually making its’ way to the window where it crystallizes….hurtful words being transformed in to beautiful ice patterns. I think I stole the essential idea of that image from somewhere/someone but I can’t remember who….but that is what artists do, we borrow and transform and pass it along.
This song was originally written for One Soul Now but we never found the right intensity for it so we left it off the album, even though we had been performing it live leading up to the albums release. A few more years under our belts and the song now sits in our wheel-house. We kept the structure from our original attempt, but added a more minimalistic approach to the bass and drums. Al added some of his Mofo keyboard sounds to keep the whole affair on the surreal side.
Not everything about Ikea is depressing….here’s a lighter look at its culture:
The Trinity Session is one of 5 nominees for Canada’s best album of the 1980’s. The “winner” will be decided by public vote. If you are of the opinion that Trinity should take home the honour, please vote before October 8th (personally I voted for Mary Margaret O’Hara’s Miss America, but don’t let that sway you). You can find your on-line ballot here.
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.
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.
My oldest daughter was adopted from China. When we adopted her they handed us a very slim file filled with a lot of official looking stamps and signatures but not much information. But there was a police document that said that she was found beneath the Tax Bureau Gate on the morning of September 26, 1997. It was explained to us that these abandoned children are often left outside a government building in the hopes that they will be found quickly by someone responsible enough to contact the authorities.
A large chunk of the Miles From Our Home album was about wading through the adoption process and the frustrations of knowing that your child is out there, but red tape and thousands of miles sit between you and her. A large part of Open was about finding oneself in a whole new world filled with love, hope, fear and mystery: the terrifying world of parenthood. As we got closer to adopting and meeting our daughter, my wife and I would often look up at the moon and wonder if she, too, would be gazing at the same moon tonight, half a world away.
My daughter goes off to college this year, she is a rock climber who competes at the national level, she just finished a 52 day canoe trip above the Arctic circle, she is a wonder. The trajectory of a single life is an astonishing thing.
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 late 1996 my wife and I rented a beat up old mill house, two hours Northeast of Toronto, idyllically situated in the rolling hills of Northumberland County. It was the most serene little spot. It overlooked a four-acre stream fed pond, which transformed itself hourly with the shifting light. Our days were filled with sound of the hundred or so birds, that made our patch of land their home: our nights with the sound of water splashing over top of the mill’s damn. The locals knew the spot as Maiden’s Mill, named after the family that established the mill over 150 years earlier.
This was in the time-before-children…an easier, simpler time. We rented the house for about twelve months and watched all the seasons pass on through our little slice of paradise. I wrote and she painted. During that time the rest of the band came up and took up residency for a while and we worked on the songs that turned into the Miles From Our Home album. Along with the songs that ended up on that album, I wrote about twenty other songs. One of those songs was One Soul Now.
One Soul Now was written right at the end of the Miles From Our Home sessions and we even worked up a full band demo of the song in order to consider it for that project. We always liked it, but we never felt comfortable with the groove or arrangement that we had come up with. We had a lot of songs on our plate at that time so we decided to shelve it. During the writing of Open we briefly took it out again (along with I Did It All For You, which was written and recorded at Maiden’s Mill and made it on to Open), but that album took on a life of it own and One Soul Now was, once again, put away.
When the songs for the “new album” began to form I immediately thought about One Soul Now and how its main lyrical theme about, all living things on this earth being tied into one overpowering life-force, was an excellent counterpoint to many of the songs that were about disconnection and confusion. And the title of the song began to take on a fresh meaning as the world began to turn itself upside down and splinter into more menacing and aggressive factions and tribes. The phrase One Soul Now almost began to sound like a call to arms (or at least a call to link arms) for these troubled times.
The song was inspired by those magical twilights at Maidens Mill, just as the sun was passing through its last few degrees before disappearing for the day. Everything would become absolutely still. The insects, the birds, the breeze, and even the water on the pond would just stop. And I would sit there on the edge of the pond and for a brief instant I could almost tap in to that life force which mysteriously binds us all. It was always an exhilarating and overwhelming moment. I often think that if we could gather up all of the world’s leading combatants, bring them up to Maiden’s Mill and have them all shut up and sit down on the edge of that pond and then have them all zone in to the energy “that twilight brings”………the worlds problems would be solved before sundown.
Our Notes Falling Slow box set is now available for pre-order. All pre-order box sets will be signed by the four of us and we will be mailing them out on October 12th in hopes of it getting to you before the official, Oct 30th release date. There will also be a digital version of the box set available on Oct 30th and we plan to eventually release it on vinyl (but that is a few months off).
This is a four CD box set made up of newly remastered versions of the three studio albums that we released in the 2000’s (Open, One Soul Now and At The End Of Paths Taken) and a fourth bonus disc that contains newly recorded songs that were written during the making of the three albums. There is also a 34 page booklet included with the box set.
The pre-order also offers some great bundles. You can buy Notes Falling Slow and add in one or both of our DVDs Open Road and Long Journey Home. Open Road was created while we toured the Open album. It contains over four hours of live concerts (full band and Margo and Michael acoustic performances), interviews and a behind the scenes documentary. The documentary was created from all of the photos and video that we shot while we were touring around the world. It is a true peak behind the scenes through the eyes of those who lived it. Long Journey Home is a full 5.1 HD concert DVD of a performance that we gave at the Liverpool Philharmonic Hall at the end of the One Soul Now tour. It’s beautifully shot and recorded and the band was firing on all cylinders. It also contains interviews with all the band members and some behind the scenes footage shot during sound check for the show.
This coming week we’ll be starting a new blog series called Words Falling Slow in which I will be writing about the creation/inspiration/history of various songs found on the box set…so please check back here or Like our Facebook page where we will be posting links to the blog.
We’re back on the road next month and will be adding tour dates throughout the coming year. Please check out the tour dates page every now and then to see if we are coming to your neck of the woods.
I hope everyone had a great summer and had a chance to get away….and breathe. My summer was close to perfect; I caught some bass and speckled trout in the Adirondacks, salmon on the West Coast and some pike in Northern Ontario; spent many hours floating around a lake (on my back and in a canoe); watched my Blue Jays emerge from being just another bumbling, fumbling .500 team, in to World Series contenders; we played a handful of concerts around the country; and put the finishing touches on our upcoming box set release, Notes Falling Slow.
I'll spare you the details about my fishing adventures and stick to news about the box set. We don't have a definitive release date yet, but we are aiming for a late October release and we will have them in hand for our October shows on the east coast. The box set is made up of four discs that include remastered versions of the three studio albums that we released in the 2000's (Open, One Soul Now and At The End Of Paths Taken) and a fourth disc, called Notes Falling Slow. This fourth disc is made up of songs that were written during the making of the three studio albums, but never completed or released. A few of these songs made it to the band demo stage, some never made it past my songwriting demo phase and a couple were completed but were left off the final albums for various reasons. This summer we got together, re-imagined and recorded, all but two of the songs for this special project. The result is a collection of songs that has a touch of our trademark psychedelia with a large dose of our folk roots shining through. For a taste of what's to come, you can stream Cold Evening Wind by clicking here. This is a song that we have made a few attempts at recording, but we never felt that we had properly captured the quiet desperation that the song required, until now. We will be posting a lot more details about the box set on our website and facebook page in the coming couple of months so please check in. Also, make sure you keep an eye on our tour page as we have a few tours that are being put together for the coming year.
Run For Your Life is one of those songs that could easily be left out of The Beatles catalogue and no one would care a wit. It appears at the end of Rubber Soul almost as an after-thought. To be quite honest, its just not that good a song, its the sort of thing Lennon could toss off between waking up and heading down to Abbey Road for the days session. We came across it when we were asked to cover a song off of Rubber Soul to celebrate its 40th birthday. The good songs were already taken so we settled on Run For Your Life and decided to try and test the old silk purse/sows ear saying. We had fun with it, the bass line and bass tone is killer, I like the gang background vocals and Margo does an excellent job at turning the gender tables.
Jerry came in to the studio and tossed off a handful of the dozens of cover tunes that he has in his repertoire. This one popped out with all of its beautifully jagged edges.
