TIME WILL TELL
It's kind of a concept album...
Here's the quick rundown on how and why
this album came to be.
It's kind of a concept album...
Here's the quick rundown on how and why
this album came to be.
Me, meeting my first guitar (Franciscan dreadnought), Christmas 1972.
WHEN YOU PLAY GUITAR FOR FIFTY YEARS, you're bound to come up with ideas of your own. Snippets of melodies, chord progressions; lyric sparks and phrases, maybe even complete verses; interesting rhythms and more. They start to accumulate in your head... then on pages and even scraps of paper... then also maybe on various types of recording media -- cassettes, thumbdrives, CDs, computers and phones. The big question, of course, is what to do with those ideas.
Well, for far, far too long, I did very little.
In December of 2022, anticipating the upcoming completion of my 64th trip around the sun, I realized that, after all these years, I had accumulated a pretty extensive library of ideas over the many years -- some of them seeming to be worthy of further development. Should I finally, actually, truly, do something with them? Well, the proverbial stars finally aligned; the will to actually create something of my own overtook all the procrastination, laziness and negative thoughts, and I decided to begin working on a recording project that would, at the very least, place a star of my own -- however faint and tiny -- in the vast galaxy of original recorded music.
One factor in this reversal of mindset had to do with The Beatles and their song When I'm Sixty-Four. Knowing that I'd be turning 64 in August of 2023, and having always been a huge Beatles fan, I reflected on all the past milestones I'd passed with very little musical creativity to show for it (turning 40... then 50... then... well, you see the pattern). That song and that title has lingered in the back of my mind for some time. That song was part of the magic that permanently etched itself into my young mind when I first heard the Sgt. Pepper album -- an exact moment I still vividly remember. Now, it just felt like something big should happen in my life "when I'm sixty-four." That fast-approaching number was like a constant reminder to wait no more -- to stop the procrastination and get down to it. (I'll also add that the album title and title song, Time Will Tell, is a bit of a nod to the more than 30-year "fermentation period" of original material that this album spans.)
I'd like to think that this musical effort would still have happened without the spark of When I'm Sixty-Four (but thank god it wasn't called When I'm Eighty-Four). I'd also like to have found the wherewithal to have taken this step 20 or 30 years ago. But as 'they' often say, It Is What It Is. I'm glad I finally made it happen -- and of course, I'm hoping anyone who hears it finds at least a few moments of something they enjoy in it. Thanks for taking a look and listen.
Thumb up.
- Sean Lewis
October 2023