The Clock of the Long Now, a song

Here's another song from my recent album, inversions.  The "clock of the long now" is a project some scientists and engineers are working on in Nevada somewhere.  It's a clock that's designed to keep time for the next 10,000 years. The goal of the project is to inspire long-term thinking in a world where our whole sense of time is organized around increasingly ephemeral time-spans. I have trouble imagining the next ten years (sometimes 10 minutes is a stretch): this clock ticks once a year, with a "century hand" that advances every hundred years and a cuckoo that comes out every millenium.

From the first time I heard about it, I've always thought there was a song in there, somewhere, waiting to be sung.  And last year, when my heart sort of entered this surreal place where life itself seemed like an interminable now, it was very cathartic to finally find the time to sit down and write it.

Here's what I came up with:





World’s turning in a time lapse freeze frame
Capturing the moment on the face of the clock of the
Long now, ticking in the dark of the
Long night of the soul and

It’s of the essence it’s on our hands it
Heals all wounds it waits for no man
Somehow you got stuck in the middle of a
Long now (how time flies)

We had forever burning in our hearts
Warming our hands in the flickering light

There’s time to scatter stones
And to gather them again
Time to tear and time to mend
You know I’d turn back the hands if I knew how
To wind the clock of the long now

Yesterday, today tomorrow
Time slips by it’s running to a stand still
Life in beautiful motion
Pictures (thaw the freeze frame)
A day with you is like a thousand
Years are flying by like restless
Days ago I thought I saw
Eternity in your eyes

We had forever burning in our hearts
Warming our souls in the flickering light

There’s time to scatter stones
And to gather them again
Time to tear and time to mend
You know I’d turn back the hands if I knew how
To wind the clock of the long now
Ticking in the dark it’s ticking in the dark it’s
ticking in the dark of the night of the long now (x4)

I thought I heard a thief knocking on my door
I thought I saw the sky turn red last night
Powers shaking the stars were falling
An angel calling in my dreams last night

There’s time to scatter stones
And to gather them again
Time to tear and time to mend
You know I’d turn back the hands if I knew how
To wind the clock of the long now