SlowSand

SlowSand You know, like quicksand…but slower….anyway…this was a song I wrote just out of college. I had no idea what I wanted to do and felt like I was just sitting around watching a clock tick my life away. As I started sketching out my thoughts, I thought about the image of my living room as the bottom of an hourglass, slowly filling up with sand as I sat there. I made that my chorus and tried to come up with other ways to play with the idea of time…the pendulum swing of a grandfather clock, the drip of water from a faucet, the ring of a morning alarm…things that speak of time. When I went back to this idea, years later, I had the thought that it would be cool to set a metronome to click off perfect seconds and use that as percussion. I found that it was just too slow…so when I played it about where I liked it, it went up to about 75 bpm. I started to justify it by thinking that maybe that’s how long seconds are on another planet (I couldn’t decide how to derive the “second” though…relative to day length, I thought, but then do you just assign one full planetary rotation as “24hours”? Went to look up how we ended up with 24 hours, and was unsatisfied with the results, except for the bit where the concept of hours being equal didn’t come into use until the 1300’s when mechanical clocks became available, before then, daylight had 12 hours regardless of how long that was, so summer hours were longer than winter hours…so maybe the 40 minute long hours near the winter solstice at my latitude would better describe this slightly faster second…or maybe we just call it 75 bpm and be done with it….) Also, this guitar is Al…he’s got nylon strings and comes camping with me. He felt left out, so here he is…