Oof, how am I going to do this? I want this song to do its thing without any suspension of disbelief and without needing to come with a manual. But I want it to do a thing to you that is different from what it does to me or to anyone else.

I did not come up with the idea for “Time Out Of Mind” by taking a song and purposing it. The thing came like this and I wasn’t sure why. The wrong-footing, the dashing of expectations, the dream-logic transitions, the completely mismatched musical directions were inherent in the writing process. I wasn’t sure why but I knew there was a reason.

Then into the recording I continued to be guided by a hand the provenance of which I was unsure. But I decided to trust it; it was not going to rejected by Sony for being weird, if you get my drift.

Anyone who knows ‘60s Auteur Pop knows that this isn’t a new thing by any means. But what the collideascopic, pastiche tape-edit masterpieces of Mssrs. Wilson, Lennon et. al. were trying to convey a representation of the psychedelic or spiritual experience. My pinball-thought-representation happened in real time and it wasn’t about anything so prosaic as a head full of acid. The song is organically thus, it was performed linearly without edits for some reason I wasn’t sure of. It was performed of a piece and that foundation was built upon. It was murder until I realized it wasn’t. Every transition, every shift was countable as long as it was counted in the same dream logic in which it was conceived. It was a Jedi mind trick that could only happen if non-linearity was embraced, not discarded in the logical world of the recording studio. I started to understand it then. It was an exercise. There was a purpose.

It took reading the completed lyric sheet to fully understand. I didn’t understand anything about this. The lyrics are an utter trifle, images of cities and freeways and crooked smiles and summer and this and that. But when I applied the same dream logic that informed the creation I understood.

It’s about music. It’s about a musical brain that has been away from pure creativity trying to reset. It is the lazy, unutilized, out-of-practice neurons warming up for another go. As soon as I saw the line, “it’s 1999 and I’m back on the ride again…” I understood. “Time Out Of Mind” is very specifically about re-entering an old and very haunted house with a brand-new crucifix.

This is My Mind On Music. Jumping around, checking my influences, gathering my tools. Los Angeles 1966, Paris 1944, San Diego 1999, The Brill Building in the ‘50’s, London 1979. Visiting my old haunts, but in a dream, logic be damned, the way you visit your old haunts. “Are you going to be the kind of girl that makes a fuss?” isn’t a blithely chauvinistic moment in an old love song. It’s asking Music if she wants to commit or if she wants to fuck about. But I wasn’t waiting for Her, you see. She was waiting for me. The radio was always playing but I wasn’t listening.

“Time Out Of Mind” is turning the knob on a radio, running through the stations, feeling the old grooves from here and there and everywhere, feeling if they still resonate, if they still inspire, if they still mean anything, if they still want to party.

Man, do they.

"Brand new water" is an image referring to our psyches. We've usually taken on some dirty water and it's tempting to pour it into the next convenient soul. "Brand new water" is when your state is such that to the world and people you are like a fresh mountain stream.

Musical and Production Notes

Again, oof. There is so much happening here. We move from Elton John ballad to Beach Boys timpani ‘n’ sleighbells to ‘90s white boy R&B to slick 2000’s pop to Edith Piaf on an old 78 to, I think a sort of Franki Valli showboat hook to Bruno Mars stabs and punches to outer space and then around again. There are guitar clouds out of The Police, tape phasing from 1967, uptown Manhattan Transfer uber-square 4 part harmonies, a histrionic old hook that practically samples “La Vie En Rose”, it’s just a whole lot.

There are new and interesting things that I did. I did all the vocals and harmonies very early in the game, against just a basic rhythm track, so subsequent overdubs would step around them and a battle would not have to ensue in the mix. And then a massive battle ensued in the mix but by design. I threw everything at this song and then peeled away and peeled away and peeled away.

The key of E predominates almost throughout with a side journey into D for the “Piaf” section (to further dramatize the re-rise to tonic E for the “Frankie Valli” section) and a sort of sideways journey to relative minor C sharp minor for the ‘90s Britney-Spears-ain’t-LA-grand sections. The white boy “Drops Of Jupiter” sections are boilerplate I-ii-IV-V with a little salty moment of iv6/V, all happening with a I pedal throughout. On the last verse this is perverted into I-II-IV-I with a very fast triplet rhythm guitar pattern because it’s now decided to be “Eight Days A Week” for a few seconds. The “LA” sections are sweet and uptown with the move to relative minor vi-ii-Ivmaj7/V-Imaj7, lovely. There was a marimba doubling the melody a-la-“Aja” here; this had to go. Something had to go. Probably more things should have gone, but it was fun.

The count-in for the third verse is John Lennon counting in “I’m So Tired” from 1968. The weird boomerang thing that brings in the second “LA” section is from the top of “Both Ends Burning” by Roxy Music from 1975. Thus there is literal sampling as well as chordal “sampling”. There are a lot of these moments lurking, I won’t give away any more except one quick shout out to my old band, the mighty fiction, for the broken radio sample that concludes the proceedings. This came from our 2000 unreleased masterpiece "Space Rock Opera".

To make this recording happen the way it needed to I needed some “reference” tracks to play the finished parts against until I had enough rhythm to support the thing. The “reference” tracks of just click track and piano took a couple of days to get down because they had to support not only tempo changes but slowings-down and speedings-up. That was a bear.

The “uptown” 4-part tripled harmonies in the “LA” sections and the “Franki Valli” sections were scrapped and redone twice. I was WAY out of practice but I got there. The lead vocal was a breeze and performed almost linearly. It was just a question of hitting it on a good day and warming up a LOT; the range is 3 octaves and I’m old.

It was all just a huge mystery until it wasn’t. “Time Out Of Mind” is a song about what songs are about. It’s a song about not fighting non-linearity, about the freedom to roam in one’s mind and look through all the rooms for things that were lost.

All the things were right were I left them.

"Time Out Of Mind" does not exist without:

The Beach Boys
The Beatles
Montell Jordan
Britney Spears
Serge Gainsburg
Rufus Wainwright
Edith Piaf
The Police
Elton John
Roxy Music
Michael Penn
Kurt Vonnegut
Parallel dimensions
Franki Valli and the Four Seasons
The Four Seasons Landscaping Company
Steely Dan
fiction
Train
Silk-E-Fyne
Louiguy and Robert Chauvigny