The earth spins at a slower clip than it did many millennia ago, when days clocked in at an estimated 21 hours. In 2020, however, scientists detected that the trend had reversed, if ever so slightly, with the earth shaving milliseconds from its rotation when compared to the decades immediately preceding it. 2021 and 2022 saw similar upticks. There are scientific reasons for it, of course, with many experts citing a cause and effect related to the world’s tides.
All I really know, however, is what David Crosby sang on “Delta,” the ethereal gem found on Crosby, Stills & Nash’s 1982 Daylight Again album: “Time stops here, on the delta/while they dance/while they dance…” It’s something of an auditory illusion, if you will, but the best songs, the best performances, stop the clock. The latest such example comes courtesy of singer-songwriter Hayley Reardon, who’s accompanied by guitarists Pau Figueres and Arnau Figueres on Live at Starseed Studios. The Essex, Mass., recording features 13 songs arranged for three guitars and…wow. Just wow. “This is hypnotic,” Diane said while we listened to it while out and about this a.m. I couldn’t agree more. There’s a late ‘60s/early ‘70s vibe to the songs with a dash of Shawn Colvin mixed in.
The songs themselves are not original to this set, but are pulled from her last few EPs. (Last year’s Changes was one of my favorites.) Re-imagining the tunes as a trio endeavor adds to the magic, no doubt, but the mesmerizing quality of Reardon’s vocals gliding atop the guitars, along with her lyrics, are the stars here. She crafts evocative stories, presumably drawn from her life, that should be accessible to all who have a heart.
“Awake in Berlin,” for instance, finds her mulling over a fading relationship while sharing vivid imagery. “It’s two a.m., I’m awake in Berlin/For the first of two shifts, you are on your way in/To that restaurant on 12th that I never liked/There’s a word for this feeling here, ‘einsamkeit’/And while I’m asleep you are driving back home/To the place where we lived, now you live there alone/Where we’d hide from the landlord and the weird girls upstairs/My guitar’s in your closet, I know it’s safe there.” Call it solitude standing, if you will, but with the realization—shared on the chorus—that the relationship’s end falls on her: “And I finally figured it out/For the first time, something’s clеar/There’s no way of summing this up excеpt to say/That I don’t know how I feel/And I’m not sure I ever will.”
“Bethany,” another highlight, shares the saga of a young woman who follows her musician love to California, where she learns “freedom never comes easy/And love it never comes freely.” Along the way, she takes solace from the ‘70s, the stars and such old records as Joni Mitchell’s “Blonde in the Bleachers.” (That’s a deft choice, by the way, given that it digs into a similar scenario.)
The album’s closer, “The Little Sadness,” is another stunner, as hypnotic here—perhaps more so—as on the 2022 video that first turned me onto Reardon’s music. It digs into the realities faced by expats everywhere, with the distance between loved ones sometimes measured by more than just by miles. “Everyone I love is asleep out there,” in that sense, changes its meaning by song’s end.
So, to return to the top, whether the earth’s rotation is adding milliseconds matters not to us in the present. Those in the distant future may have issues, granted, if those milliseconds become minutes if not hours. To them I say this: Time stops here, on Live at Starseed Studios. Give it a spin.
The track list:
The Old Grey Cat 
A beautiful trilogy!
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