Time is a Sparrow is being represented for sync by In the Groove Music except for "Still Be Here" which is being represented by Complete Tracks.
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Pain is inevitable, the Buddha tells us, but suffering is largely a matter of choice. It’s a tough pill to swallow, bitter and bittersweet, to realize that the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune – struggle, stress, loneliness, love’s losses, time’s slog, death itself – hit all of us, but wound us differently according to our perspective and experience. It’s all too much, really, but sometimes we find the capacity to muddle through and discover a silver lining in the darkest of clouds. To be or not to be is not the question, it’s the proposition. I can’t go on, the poet said, and yet I’ll go on. Indeed. Hope is not a quantity but a quality–of mind, of heart, of wisdom.
All of this would seem out of place here, were it not a fitting inroad to the gorgeous textures and harrowing depths of Time is a Sparrow, the latest album from Last Year’s Man. A creation spearheaded by singer/songwriter Tyler Fortier (his second full-length album under that pseudonym), this starkly beautiful album is haunted by an obsessive quest to salvage something–anything–from the wreckage of days. It is at once downbeat and upward swinging, a kind of sad-happy collection of hymns in the key of the American West–folksy, aridly countrified, and yet threaded through with a soaring cathedral quality that echoes in the architecture of its melodies. Time trips through the songs like a devouring ghost, and moments of beauty and devastation rise up, flash frozen in lyrical reckonings that carry the heft of past regrets and small glories. The persistence of memory looms large.
“I used to have something to say,” Fortier sings on the album opener, “Better Left Unsaid,” finishing the stanza with the tamped wisdom of vanished youth: “But you can’t open old doors, and expect to get somewhere new.” This confessional line, not self-weary but weary of self, sets the tone for the album’s inward journey. Here is a man just moments past the crossroads of youth (Fortier is 37, married, with two kids), facing down a history of what was supposed to be up against a present of what is. Big dreams and grand ambitions have given way to the ambivalent consolation of small moments. “There are silver linings all around,” he sings gently over a simple keyboard and guitar refrain, “but I’m coming up empty now.” Slouching toward forgiveness, the song is a moving plea to stop trying to prove ourselves at every moment: to let the unspeakable remain unspoken.
Like an immediate counterpoint comes the second track, “Spill the Light,” an upbeat piece of simplified pop-electronica that deserves a seat beside Paul Westerberg’s click-track masterpiece “Within Your Reach.” If the opening number plumbed the interiors, this song reaches outward to seek the light in the darkness, and celebrate the thorns along with the rose. “Search the tangles of her mapless heart,” Fortier sings in a voice of longing and hope, “and spill the light.” In an album full of gems, this song stands out as a sort of beacon to its musical and lyrical themes of strife, survival and hope–of darkness and light.
The triptych of tracks that follows, so perfectly placed, could stand alone, though the songs, taken as a whole, also form an ephemeral signpost gently nudging us toward the album’s abiding theme that this too shall, and must, pass. “Time is a Sparrow” is, quite simply, gorgeous–a lilting, hypnotic lullaby that delves into the mystery of time itself. “If time is a number, stuck up on the wall,” Fortier practically whispers, “hanging like your savior, claiming to heal us all.” Metaphors of time are proposed and upended, until all that remains is love and memory, “slipping through the crack, always looking back.” The next track, “Only Memories,” continues this journey, but in a darker vein; here, the feeling is elegiac and minor-keyed, and the lyrics are dogged by mortality itself. And yet, as with so much of the album, a beleaguered note of hope is dragged from the looming darkness: “I love you with all that I am, until we’re only memories.” On “Time Brings Change,” Fortier takes on the mantle of beautiful loser, turning an acknowledgement of flaws – “I’m a broken glass bottle in the night under a bed of stars waiting to shine” – into a kind of benediction, moving toward acceptance and love. A subdued and eminently catchy country jangle elevates the song, and something like happiness prevails. The song skips along, shyly grinning, to its final line: “Just let me shine.”
Unconditional, undying love colors the composition of “Still Be Here,” a song that makes the promise to stick around through thick and thin. The music here is thicker, more layered, more orchestral–a bass drum thudding like a heartbeat, a threading of slide guitar, a texture of plucked and strummed guitars–the better to buoy up lyrics that reach forth in comfort “when there’s nothing left to weather, no monsters to fear… I’ll still be here.” Whether the song is for a love, friend or child doesn’t matter; its heartfelt words hold true in the most universal sense, as does the song’s undeniable appeal.
In a similar manner, the Dylanesque vibrations of “Right Where We Are” recall the breeziness and freedom of a peaceful stroll in the countryside. Fortier’s voice is friendly and beckoning here, beckoning the listener along on a journey into the promise of the present moment: “Steal the light and make it shine,” he sings in the chorus, “we could wait our whole lives in this town…” A classic declaration of busted American zen recalling the best of the Beats, the song suggests that wherever you go, there you are, and the road–toward hope, love, forgiveness, acceptance–is always under your feet.
Recalling at times the downbeat majesty of Elliott Smith, “Last Thing I Do” is a spectral love song that nods in weariness at life’s sharp edges (“The stars are razor blades aiming for your heart”) before offering solitary shelter from the storm. “I will protect you,” Fortier sings, just as a parent gives solace to a child, “if it’s the last thing I do”; a distant martial snare beat kicks in, a sad march for the wounded in life’s psychic battlefield, before the song raises a tattered flag for love’s sole survivors. Nowhere is the album’s play of darkness and light more evident, as the war-torn lyrics turn toward a difficult peace in a world torn apart. “But what if I can’t?” he asks, before twisting up the courage, “this road is a lonely way, I would shoulder all the blame, to keep you humble, to keep you brave, to keep you innocent and safe.”
The album’s penultimate number, “Chasing Down the Sun,” plays like a rollicking, sad-happy interlude–a moment of uncertainty and questioning that, ironically, feels like an act of letting go, carefree and casually shrugging. Bright, effervescent guitar and a shuffling beat lend the song a sunny appeal. “What if we spend our whole lives like ships in the night where no one wins,” Fortier sings over the tasty melody, “chasing down the sun again.” In the tradition of songwriters like Paul Simon and Paul Westerberg, Fortier cloaks disquiet and confusion in the confection of irresistible pop, dropped like a sly counterpoint before the album’s final corker.
The album’s last track, the darkly evocative “A Different Light,” has an almost cinematic feel, like a spaghetti western outro penned by Townes Van Zandt. With its meditative, almost mournful guitar phrasing, trotting beat and airy, lonesome lyrics, it provides a fitting coda to the album–you can almost see Fortier riding off into the uncertain sunset, a solitary figure, hero and antihero, who has posed more questions than can be answered. “There’s a whole other world inside my mind,” he sings, “half forgotten dreams and songs I’ll never sing.” Loss is eulogized, memories blur and fade, and lovers are “just strangers in a different light.” It is, indeed, the end of the album’s journey through light and dark, time and its erasure, and the song casts a shadow of hushed resignation: today’s battles are done, the defeats are tallied, and hope is there on the horizon, if only for fleeting moments.
-Rick Levin