Notes Falling Slow

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Notes Falling Slow now available everywhere

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Our new box set, Notes Falling Slow, is now available throughout North America and Europe “wherever fine music is sold”. It’s also available on-line through all the usual mega-suppliers (itunes, Amazon etc). If you can, please patronize your local indy music store, if they don’t have it in stock give them hell and tell them to order it. You can find out more about the box set here (you can also order it directly from us if you so desire). If you weren’t keeping up on our blogs about the inside workings of some of the songs on the box set you can catch up by scrolling down this page.

We are heading back out on the road this week. You can follow our progress through our Facebook page and through our Instagram account.  We also have some dates lined up for early in the coming new year. You can check out the dates on our Tour page. We hope to see some of you out there.

 

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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.

 

End of Summer wrap-up…Notes Falling Slow

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.

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