The passage of time has never not been on my mind. As 2024 winds down, this is especially so. Autumn settles deep in the belly of November, the holiday season has working Americans shuttering their blinds and sending OOO auto-replies, and January marks a new calendar year with a pleading question - what have you DONE with this year?

Time is concave and convex all at once - it is stretching low like a dog in mid-afternoon sun, it is smashed tightly under a trash compactor, it is two palms a hair’s length apart, not quite touching but you can still feel the heat. On tour, we joke that a week feels like seconds and also a million years… weren’t we in Durham yesterday? Or was that two weekends ago? A couple hours can mean meeting 500 new people, playing a show, loading the van, grabbing Taco Bell, loading the van again, and arriving in a new town, or it can mean staring down a two-lane highway across the Great Plains, moving forward, minutes slide by but the setting never changes.

I’ve been using my time to participate in a little self-education lately. A morning ritual to learn tricks from my peers who are kind enough to share via YouTube, their personal social medias, etc. One thing that remains consistent between a lot of the artists & producers I look up to is when they speak about their greatest accomplishments, they always credit the luxury of having time. It seems trite to repeat the adage “good things take time” but... don’t they? We need time, we need distance, we need perspective to be able to sink into creativity, and come out the other side with enough space to assess. Many of us are asked to function in a space where deadlines creep ever closer, but does finishing something quickly enough to feed the machine really serve US any satisfaction? Moving slowly through a process seems to be a way to create something that we are actually PROUD of as opposed to… done with.

I’m still unpacking what all of this means or even where to begin with taking my time. I’ve been known to be hellbent on efficiency - I’m always playing little games with myself to see the least amount of steps it takes to get somewhere, how few times I can pass between rooms in my house when I’m tidying up, is it possible to make this drum edit in less than three mouse clicks? in one? in none?? Speed gets a job DONE but time makes the job WORTHY. With a thing as precious as time, an investment can mean bountiful returns. More on this soon… I’m still figuring it out.

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Thank you!

~Sarah

P.S. bonus Maeby pic below to momentarily lift your existential dread about the state of the world (and happy birthday to Maddie!)