Dreams and visions from 2021-2024, some apocalyptic, some archetypal. Featuring electric guitar and vocals by Timothy and guests.

Due in large part to the mutual support and deadlines of the Ithaca Songwriting Challenge (thanks to Leah West!), I entered 2024 with two albums’ worth of recordings in some process of completion.

After sorting through them, I appeared to have two collections of songs: some singer-songwriter songs, that I could perform solo reasonably well, and that were about me and my life in some way; and then a bunch of songs that were darker, more produced, more electric, and more diverse in style.

It also emerged that many of these songs were about apocalypse, or endings, or mysterious unknowns, or archetypes of the collective unconscious. That convergence seemed interesting. So I added a couple instrumentals to fit those themes, and wrote new lyrics to an existing jam track to finish it out.

So: if you’ve primarily heard me play live, these may not sound like Timothy songs. But if you’ve heard my recordings from the 80s and 90s, I think it’ll sound familiar.

I did consider making a “virtual band” - another name to release these recordings under. But ultimately that seemed a little false; I like writing and recording different musical genres and topics, so why hide that?

I hope you enjoy - good headphones and a walk or drive or a sit for 32 minutes recommended!

personnel

Special thanks to these singers for lending their voices and presences when I needed them:

• Kate Khosla: vocals on “explosion of starlings” and “fire from the dark”
• Katie Marks: vocals on “a thousand voices”
• Clara Weber: vocals on “my mother’s daughter”

and to Deborah Sam for the alpaca image on the cover.

I played the instruments, sang the rest of the vocals, recorded, mixed, remixed, tweaked for months, and made the graphics.

instruments

Every song on this album features Hellen, the Schecter Hellraiser guitar I acquired in late 2021. Its fingerboard makes it easy to do hammer-ons and pulloffs like to the hills uses. The Floyd Rose tremolo supports expressive intonation in solos like in prologue.
I love using the pickups mostly straight for a brilliant shimmery sound like the rhythm track in back to Michigan. And the Sustainiac pickup was why I bought the guitar in the first place: it creates the smooth, never-ending feedback-y notes in the background of explosion of starlings and the mighty fallen - where one friend thought he was listening to a violin. This is not a commercial, just an expression of affection, and a note that some of the sounds that you might think are a synthesizer or a digital effect are probably just Hellen doing her thing with wire and wood and analog electronics.

I also want to note that I used very little copy-and-paste on this album; nearly everything was played in real time on real instruments. If it repeats, I play it repeatedly. A couple of slight exceptions are the drum set, which is made up of notes recorded from real drums and then played back in real time as I play a pressure-sensitive drum pad; and the synthesizers (organs, etc.) which I also record in real time.

songs