Tim Warren – The Alternate Routes

The Story Behind One Dance Left

September 6, 2018 by Tim Warren

Its hard to know what a song is about, even if its yours. When I sat down to write One Dance Left I didn’t know what it would be. Its like trying to determine an persons personality when they are just born. But I can tell you how it felt and I can tell you how it feels now. As I go through life, I’m learning that I don’t know anything, but the way I feel can become known, is more tangible, and more important to me if I’m being honest.

The first time I heard “All My Friends” by LCD Soundsystem I was at a party, feeling no pain. I had lost a bunch of weight and I was rediscovering what it feels like to celebrate my own shape, in my own body. I took most of my clothes off and put on the plastic circular orb suit that happened to be laying in the corner of the field where the party was.

(it was a good party….)

I started dancing, and my friend, Taryn, joined me in the yard.

We were running,

in circles.

It was a moment I will never forget. The next day I wrote most of what would become “One Dance Left.”

When you sit down to write a song, you can know how you’re feeling, you can think you know what you want to say, but its harder to know why.

I don’t know why that song came on at that party, I don’’t why I finally found a way to lose the weight, and shed some of the grief I had been carrying in that moment. I don’t know why Kurt Leon is becoming a master of the recording studio before my eyes, or why…no matter how finished I think I am with an idea, its never really done until Eric Donnelly invents an electric guitar part and 30 other ideas you can barely hear, but would completely miss if they were absent in the track. I don’t why Ian seems to know every style of bass playing there is, and always choses the right one to assign to each one of these new songs so well… I don’t know why Taryn understands that moment at that party for me, in a way that very few people in my life ever could, and why.. when we howl the high notes in the middle of the song together, it feels like a continuation of a announcement we’ve both made in other lifetimes. I don’t know why my wife knew the exact time to let me know that this song, needed to get released as close to the way we discovered it as possible because of the feeling of it.

Maybe we don’t get to know why. But I know how it feels thanks to all of the above. and it feels like One Dance Left.

Enjoy,

Tim ‘AR 2018

MONDAY

October 16, 2017 by Tim Warren

AR Behind The Scenes, AR Music, AR Shows

Monday

Something in the recent days, in the way the weather has put us all in our place, the way some people laugh in the face of this, and refuse to admit that we are all in this together, and that science is real and unwavering in the face of ego…. sends me falling, needfully and quietly, into music. Proud and lucky to share it with people who will listen, once again for a few good nights on the road. Proud to take some small part in the shift of consciousness, that will render certain bigoted, hateful, elitist, and isolationist ideas,

powerless.

However simple, however small, however significant a role we can play…in the next 11 days, we have 9 shows. I know this is social media and I’m supposed to just take a picture of the air freshener selection at the truck stop, and tell you to come to the next show,

but now

as a father of 2, driving past the Honda Civic with the seats empty, airbags exploded and the, windshields cracked, I know there’s more at stake in this for me now. So why mix words…

All of my dreams are wrapped up in these songs, all of my nightmares, and we play them every night to exercise the possibility that something about them, something about us, in some moment of our own making, or by our mere dedicated and stubborn participation in the idea of it, could become meaningful, inspiring, and capable of softening the human heart towards something more available and healing, that is already there in all of us, but rarely called on to celebrate itself, in these bizarre times.

The people I’m charging down the road to Nashville with, are reaching for that possibility too. That’s all we can do, and that’s all we should ever hope to be doing.

Gonna be the best damn singer I can be, gonna bring it every night, and me and the band are gonna try to find new heights with each other, and within ourselves, every night for anybody there to see it. We are going to raise each other up. Gonna tell it like it is, gonna tell it like it can be, gonna tell it like it will be one day soon,

If we just keep reaching.

Nashville, Tuesday night October 17th. 3rd and Lindsley. See you there if the fates allow.

Love ya,

Tim

tim-warren

The Story Behind One Dance Left

MONDAY