The Deep Time of Song

Arrow or cycle? Second or season?

The following post is part of a Seed Pod collaboration about time. Seed Pods are a SmallStack community project designed to help smaller publications lift each other up by publishing and cross-promoting around a common theme. We’re helping each other plant the seeds for growth!

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Time flies. Time moves slow. It waits for no one, even when it’s standing still. Its phases and stages can’t be bottled. Who knows where it goes? Time hasn’t told me. This is the time of no reply. Day is done, but days can turn around. Thank you for the days; won’t you spare me over for another year? It’s the time of the season, and the times they are a-changin’. It’s two minutes to midnight, the final moments of the universe, time after time.

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I’ve been interested in songs about time for decades. Songs that take time as their topic, songs that take time to talk about time, songs about the seconds, minutes and hours, the days, months, seasons and cycles, songs that look back on years and lifetimes, songs that anticipate time to come, songs that are timely or timeless.

Much has been written about time in relation to music, not surprising given that music is thought of as the temporal art. I’ve written before about how that tends to bracket out the temporal experience of other artforms and the spatial aspects of music, but I’ll let that rest for now.

Of course it makes sense that people would want to take account of how music unfolds in time, how it plays with time, divides it, stretches it, stills it, how it soundtracks moments, rituals, lifetimes, how it works so well at recalling memories and connecting listeners to other times, places and people. In listening, we find one of the profoundest ways to share time.

I’m fascinated by how song lyrics represent time. Simplistic as it might be to focus on lyrics when there’s so much to say about time working sonically, I think that taking account of how topics get represented in song lyrics is always worthwhile. Songs can be many things, and we listen in many fashions. To focus on song lyrics should never be to forget that these are words expressed in the context of sound. Words are asked to do different things in songs than they are in speech, prose or poetry. To attend to lyrics is to attend to music.

So my interest is in what songs—and therefore what singers and songwriters and listeners—have had to say about time: how it passes, how it gets counted, what it counts for, what it teaches us or lets us forget, how it connects or disconnects us from the wider universe, how it tells us something about where we came from, where we are and where we might be going next.

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I’m starting to think about this as the deep time of song.

‘Deep time’ is a term that comes from geology, a way of naming the almost inconceivable periods that preceded human life on our planet. To apply to human song a name usually given to the tale told by the Earth’s strata is to think of a much shorter history, one that begins on the very outer surface of geological time. And I’m not even going that far back. I’m driven less by the idea of a long history, or pre-history, of song—the kind of thing Steven Mithen explores in The Singing Neanderthals—than by what Stephen Jay Gould does in his reckoning with the deep time concept in Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle.

Accounts of the evolution of song and of song’s role in evolution, fascinating as they are, require us to think back to pre-linguistic times. But I’m working with words from modern human languages, and with song’s reliance on metaphor.

Gould’s central metaphors—the arrow and the cycle—serve as useful frameworks for such a study. Here’s how he describes them in his book:

At one end of the dichotomy—I shall call it time’s arrow—history is an irreversible series of unrepeatable events. Each moment occupies its own distinct posiyion in a temporal series, and all moments, considered in proper sequence, tell a story of linked events moving in a direction.

At the other end—I shall call it time’s cycle—events have no meaning as distinct episode with causal impact upon a contingent history. Fundamental states are immanent in time, always present and never changing. Apparent motions are parts of repeating cycles, and differences of the past will be realities of the future. Time has no direction.

Applying such ways of thinking to song, I think of examples with long histories, such as folk ballads. We may sing or hear a ballad as an arrow, a story moving toward a resolution. But we will know it best, probably, by its cyclical refrains, its deployment of those floaters that are the very substance of folk song. Then, as the song travels through the decades, changing form as it goes, it becomes both arrow and cycle again.

‘The trouble with time’, Guy Clark tells us, ‘is it keeps on ticking’. Again, there’s that arrow. But he goes and makes a chorus of that observation and sings it over and over. And he makes a demo of his song, which ends up on a record, allowing people like me to play it over and over. The trouble with ‘Time’ (the Guy Clark song) is that, like any song, it gives the illusion you can go back to it again and again. There’s that cycle.

The side of a record is a single groove, a fact that’s obvious but that never fails to surprise me. The journey of the stylus is unidirectional, usually from the outer edge to the centre (some artists and record companies have reversed the direction: Jack White at Third Man, Richard Dawson at Domino). A record’s groove, then, is an arrow in the form of a spiral.

But while that record is playing I can put my hand on it, stop it, drag it back, let it go again, rein it in, have agency over its direction, repeat a section of it as many times as I wish, scratching the spiral arrow into something more like a loop or cycle.

Such is the conceptual play I’m messing with when I talk about the deep time of song. To start to approach that deep time, I’m drawn back to a kind of listing. Not only listing the songs about time that I know, and that others can guide me towards, but also the different kinds of time that songs respond to.

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Seconds. There are songs about the fleetingness of seconds, moments, instances. They speak of immediacy, of what has almost come or just gone, what needed to be captured and wasn’t. Or perhaps they don’t take time as their topic, but deal with existential matters through a brutal brevity: you suffer, but why?

Minutes. Many songs are over in a matter of minutes. It’s funny how we know, when we say ‘a matter of minutes’, that this means not very long. All minutes are matter, though: time is material and immaterial. No matter. What we’re seeking here is both a discussion of ideal song length—the kind of thing that’s been going on for years and which sound recording has made us think about so much in the last century and a half—and songs which tap into the pleasures or anxieties of short durations in their lyrics: it only takes a minute, girl, to fall in love; two minutes to midnight.

Hours. If the 45 rpm record sings the joys of the minute, the 33 1/3 LP asks us to put aside quarter hours, half hours, whole hours. The CD follows suit, extending the time of the album further. That doesn’t necessarily bring undistracted listening, but the invitation is there. Sound recording formats are as much about time management as they are about audio quality. The time management of the recording and production process, the time management of the listening experience, the time management of the song. Songs become ambitious again, reverting back to ballad time, where verses could seem endless. Solos multiply like cells, stretching songs further. Extended mixes take song moments and run with them. Dub folds the time of the song in on itself. Minutes become hours in shoegaze. Dark stars get grayfolded into hour-long patchworks of psychedelic seconds: the transitive nightfall of diamonds.

Days. Days pass. We count them. We make plans for them, wonder where they went. We’re grateful for those endless days. We celebrate and mourn them. And, more than seconds or minutes or even hours, we divide them. When talking about days we have to ask: what time of day? We have songs about sunrises and sunsets, delta dawns and twilights, lines that catch how it feels when day is done, when it’s not dark yet but it’s getting there. One singer says that your day can have seasons, which is some weird folding of time. Then there are those evening invitations.

Nights. What would songs be without the night? What would our interaction with music be without the night? The night belongs to lovers and to singers. I look to a lover or a singer to help me make it through the night. Sometimes I want a singer to brighten my night. More often, because singers can’t always be heard above the din of the brightest nights, I look to them to comfort, console and warm me in the wee small hours.

Months. From the January Man to the December days, via April in romantic cities and the September of my years, months populate song titles and lyrics as seasonal reference points, nostalgic memories and metaphors of the life course. One singer ventures forth on a May morning to meet the fate that folk songs tell so well. Another compares her life to a passing September that no one will recall. A third tells those who need to hear it that everything will be alright if we make it through December. Then it’s time to start again, and the song goes round the turn of the year.

Seasons. In the sun. In the abyss. Of the witch. Seasonal beasts. Spring rain, spring breakers. Summer time, summer wine, the summer of ’69. Endless summers. Summertime sadness. Autumn leaves and almanacs. Winter winds and wonderlands, winterlude and winterreise. Seasons come, seasons go. There’s a song for every season, and a song for all the seasons of your mind. At the start of this year, I thought I’d spend time tracking musical responses to each month. As often happens with decisions made at such times, that idea took a different trajectory. You can plan the year ahead and you can look back at the year that’s gone and see where it went, what shapes it assumed, what path it traced. Perhaps there’s a story in there, perhaps some pain or comfort, or a pattern of some kind. For many, this is the time of year for going through these motions of retrospection and projection.

Years. To talk of years is to talk of age, how we count and divide a lifetime. The years we give to others, or take from them. Years: everyone knows you’ve got to let them go. They take so long and they go so fast. From sweet sixteen to when I’m sixty-four: all those songs obsessed with ages, with being young or being old. Years thought of as seasons: September songs and the springs, summers and winters of a life. Anniversaries: it was twenty years ago today, then it was forty, then sixty. Years as constancy: I have loved you oh so many years; the thirty years waltz; the decades we’ve got ahead of us to get it right. Years from now, what will we think when we look back?

Eternities. Songs that promise you forever. Claims to endless love or loyalty. Unending pain. Time perpetuated. I will work this field and know it’s neverending. I’ll plead to be danced to the end of love. I’ll feel glad to have danced with you for a moment of forever. I’ll have a feeling that this pain will be for evermore. I’ll claim that what’s between you and I is older than that burning ball of fire up in the sky.

Other temporalities. The time of the preacher, the peasant, the quiltmaker. It seems so long ago. Time out of mind. I go in search of lost time, building songs as monuments to stand for the fallen. Cosmic time: the time of the spaceways. End times, apocalyptic times, a time for stars to be extinguished. Pleading with Death: won’t you spare me over for another year? Telling Mother Time that I’ll take a sack of what she’s carrying, that I’ll take all that she’s got till it’s gone. I guess time just makes fools of us all.

Cycles and arrows. Courses or circles? Something we go through once, or something that comes around again and again? A river or a carousel? Cartwheels turn to car wheels on the ground. There’s a river you wish you could skate away on. There’s laughter, then those tears. Laughing at the world till the barman wipes away the warm wet circles. Doing it all over again. Finding that the time is gone, the song is over, though you thought you’d something more to say.

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This takes us only so far. Every list has its limits; we need to go beyond to find meaning. There’s enough here to remind us, though, that song worlds are saturated with time.

So much time is condensed into song, and so much song is condensed into beings for whom song acts as a way of sensing the world, that to take account of how song deals with time is to realise that what is stored within each of us as sound is also a kind of deep time. I believe that is the direction I need to move: song as strata within us, as the layers of our lives and those before us, around us, following after. That might be where I’ll find the deep time of song.

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For a bit of seasonal entertainment, the kind of thing one might do to while away a pocket of time between festivities, anyone so inclined is invited to play Spot the Lyric in the text above. Comment with the details of those you find, or any others that you think are pertinent.

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A reminder that this post is part of a Seed Pod collaboration about time. Want to see more posts from this Seed Pod or join in on the fun? Head over to our roundup to learn more!