These Times
What is this album about?
An album of devotion pointed at people in danger, on their way out, or looking somewhere else.
How Does This Release Move Across Its Tracks?
The album sets out a narrator who is reliably useful to other people in trouble and keeps his own account to himself, and it holds that split across its length. Its highest points all face outward, toward a person who needs their worth argued back to them and toward a life being kept going at a roadside.
What sits between them stays in one place: apologies offered into the same conditions, and attraction catalogued privately. The album closes on the most argued of its outward turns, a case put to a friend that what he is going through is worth going through, which is the one place the giving becomes a claim rather than a service.
Tracklist
- +22
- +17
- +6
- +1
- +34
- +19
- +6
- +55
- +1
- +4
- +46
What Might This Release Do to a Listener?
An individual who takes in the whole album develops a heightened readiness to be the steady one. Its strongest passages model attention given entirely to somebody else in difficulty, and with repeated listening that giving comes to feel like the natural shape of care. Usefulness to others becomes the measure.
The clinical course is one of asymmetric practice. Sustained exposure rehearses the position of the person who apologises, waits, and keeps his own wanting to himself, and the threshold for naming a need of one's own rises. Attention flows outward, and the individual grows accustomed to it going one way.
What Might This Release Do to a Society?
A society that takes this album into common circulation grows more willing to stand by people in trouble and more inclined to keep its own wants to itself. Communal rehearsal establishes steady presence as the recognised form of love, and reassurance acquires a shared vocabulary while asking keeps a quieter one. Care becomes something a person gives.
At the population level the pattern manifests as a surplus of attachment that stays private. People remain in bonds that have turned difficult, the interval between feeling something and saying it lengthens, and communities accumulate members who are dependable to everyone and known in outline to most. Showing up becomes common, and the asking stays personal.
- opens the heart
- commiserates
- perpetuates longing
Dogma Reference
Dogma Reference is a metadata tag, not a score modifier. It flags only when a specific doctrinal framework (Christian, Islamic, Karmic/Dharmic, Institutional) is load-bearing — when worshipping inside, proclaiming, or asserting that doctrine is what the work is for. Naming the sacred does not fire the tag, and neither does a passing scriptural allusion used to illustrate a point in an otherwise secular work. Doing the doctrine does.
Are you the artist of this release? How was this release calibrated? Did we get this wrong?