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.
