TUNES // Maggie Gently – Where My Time Went
Post by Tommy
Pop music has, for the better part of a decade now, been marketed to (and therefore often written to reflect) the experiences of young people. One of the results of this has been the cultivation of a widespread cliche about emotional growing pains. Everywhere from the Beatles to Blink-182 you’ll find culturally iconic songs and lyrics about the slow and passive process of growing up. And I’m not doubting these experiences are real and authentic – much like the slow shifting of cultural norms back-lighting these songs, some growth does happen overnight.
Bay area songwriter Maggie Gently, however, nimbly circumvents those truisms on her new single “Where My Time Went” which explores and affirms the type of personal growth and actualization that comes as a result of a series of incremental commitments to reshape your life corner by corner, and all the painful uncertainty and faith required along the way.
“It’s so easy to just do nothing,” she shrugs at the tail end of the chorus, her vocals ringing clearly and crisply out of a fuzzy analog bloom. Paired neatly with its bleary VHS music video, the sound of “Where My Time Went” (produced by Eva Treadway) is impressionistic and nostalgic, a halo drawn out of the magnetic hum of gold foil guitars. The drum sound is eccentric – murky and mid-focused, yet punchy and snug in the mix; likewise with the bass’s overeager attack, like coaxing out the shapes in a blurry photo by tracing out the corners of each figure with a sharpie.
As Maggie carefully points out in the lyrics, that’s the type of faith and conviction that begets growth – if every night you poison yourself and dream of “burning something in [your] life down,” you’re being called upon to make a change, to draw an outline around something that’s happening in your life even if it still looks blurry and uncertain everywhere outside your dreams and your gut feelings. Like it or not, one way or another we end up looking back on long stretches of life wondering where our time went – whether because it took us a long time to get where we were going, or because we wasted our time in fear of the leap of faith to get there.
“Where My Time Went” is available now on all streaming services via Common Ground Collective.