Sometimes you get a reflection of your own soul through someone else's eyes; Acknowledging your path and your individuality. You no longer feel disconnected and lost. We should all be thankful for such happenings. Random and delightful.

Arrangement, Duduk, Setar, Acoustic Guitar: Sina Momtahan

Through The Window Of Her Soul

T came up with the chorus of ‘When The Fire Dreams’ around June of 2019, and then when he went in the studio with Bryant that July for ‘Lost in Love No More’s pre-recording development, Bryant suggested the style that the verses might be in and T went home and wrote one verse. It was not until March of 2020 did T write the second verse just before the Southern Time Band begins recording the song. What was first imagined to be in a Reggae style, turned out to be more in a New Orleans’.

The ‘fire’ is the human spirit according to T. T realized that with all the deception and corruption in our world (e.g., Jeffrey Epstein did not kill himself in the August of that year), that only when people give their power away to the powers that should not be, is this predator class capable of enslaving humanity. Therefore, the only way to prevent one’s own enslavement is by ‘firing the human spirit’ ~ dreaming and realizing those beautiful, unabashedly human and ‘imperfect’ dreams!!

When The Fire Dreams

This little ditty came as a most pleasant surprise as the Southern Time Band was recording ‘Lost in Love No More’ in the spring of 2020.

Bryant Didier, the band’s bassist and producer, got inspiration from the brief intro of ‘Desert Moon’ to expand the piano chord arpeggio into an eventual, nearly one-minute soundscape of instrumental oblivion. Rick Sacks, Donne Roberts, and Bryant laid down their tracks to it, and then Mark Hundevad and Danny DePoe did theirs. Then came the mixing week, end of June 2020, and when we came to this track, Bryant and T did not have a title! So, while Bryant was busy doing his mixing thang (B’s the hardest working musician in the world, in T’s opinion), T started googling Kurt Vonnegut-associated made-up names from his fictional books and stumbled on Tralfamadore!

In Wikipedia’s own words ~

“Tralfamadorians can experience reality in four dimensions, meaning, roughly, that they have total access to past, present, and future; they can perceive any point in time at will. Able to see along the universe’s timeline, they know the exact time and place of its accidental annihilation as the result of a Tralfamadorian experiment but are powerless to prevent it. Because they believe that when a being dies, it continues to live in other times and places, their response to death is, “So it goes.” They are placid in their fatalism, and patiently explain their philosophy to Pilgrim during the interval he spends caged in a Tralfamadorian zoo. Eventually, Pilgrim adopts their attitude and returns to Earth.”

T, BTW, is NOT from Tralfamadore, he is from Zyx. Zyx will be briefly explained in the first movie of the ‘Southern Time Tetralogy’ ~ ‘Southern Time, Deception.’

Tralfamador

The second song of ‘Lost in Love No More,’ ‘Time’ was a song T wrote the day before he turned thirty in 2006.  A few months previously, he and the Southern Time team had put on the first iteration of ‘Southern Time’ as a multimedia stage production in Vancouver, B.C.  So T, despite being incredibly in monetary debt, had much hope and inspiration for what his future might hold

(In the West, at least, there is much inner pressure on twenty-somethings ‘to do something’ extraordinary or at least somewhat significant with their professional lives by age thirty.)  When the inspiration hits, a true artist will heed the calling and output the download they get from the Source, or from whatever one might want to name that higher creative entity that moves an artist to create.

Time

In 2004, T wrote this song.

He had been playing the cello and piano in a few rock bands, for a couple of years, but did not choose music as his career only to play ‘second fiddle.’ Since testing HIV positive in 1996 when he was twenty, he wanted to make the world a better through his compelling story and musical talents, so in 2004 he attended a four-week workshop where artists learned how to do business out of their art. It was then that he realized that his story and music he had written so far would best be told in ‘rock opera’ form!

Soon after this workshop, he began writing the first script for the stage production of ‘Southern Time,’ and wrote this song. Thus, this song turned out to be in musical theater style, with a rock opera edge.

The song starts from Dreamer’s perspective (Dreamer, based on T, is the main character of the ‘Southern Time Tetralogy.’) At verse three, the voices/demons inside Dreamer’s head start to berate Dreamer for being the loser that he perceives himself to be. By the end of the song, the voices in Dreamer’s head give Dreamer a hopeful message…

Searching For Love

‘Neville’ was a song inspired by the breakthrough in the reconciliation process he and the cello professor who infected T with HIV were having in 2014 (as an example of restorative justice). Not too long after, though, the professor refused to give his consent for T to represent his likeness in the screenplays for the ‘Southern Time Tetralogy’ T was writing at the time. However, for a moment in time (and for a couple of years before the professor passed away in 2018), T and the professor genuinely loved each other (and not in a sexual way) for the first time.

T describes the lyrics of this song as “coming to terms with one’s inner child, the masculine, feminine, animalistic and God parts within every one of us.”

Neville

The first song of ‘Lost in Love No More,’ ‘Lost in Love,’ encapsulates the arc of the concept album in a nutshell ~ from despair and loss to restoration and triumph. T wrote this song in 2016 in preparation for AIDS 2016, but the song’s eventual positive resolution was not reflected in T’s life until 2017 when he met his future wife and mother of his child.

The song tells of the journey of searching for love, not only T has felt throughout his life especially since living with HIV, but something many people regardless of time and space have felt ~ trying to find love from outside themselves only to realize that one first must love themselves before another can respectfully and honestly love them.

Lost In Love

And, this is what one gets for ‘searching for love in all the wrong places.’ T wrote this song when he was around twenty-eight, around 2004. He was fed up with the vain promises and fake personas in Vancouver’s music industry, let alone the obvious lies (for those who critically think) in the mainstream media, specifically regarding the ‘War on Terror.’ Lies in religion lies everyone tells everyone ~ why our world is so messed up.

This is one of T’s most political/social activist songs.

Lies

‘Hey, Charlie’ was a song T wrote in 2018 in preparation for AIDS 2018 and inspired by the true and full reconciliation he and the professor who infected him with HIV obtained a year and a half earlier. T’s professor passed away a few months later. It is written from a five or six-year-old Dreamer and Chuck’s (the name of the character representing the professor in the ‘Southern Time Tetralogy’) perspective.

It is a message that, if Dreamer and Charlie as children and adults can find a way to reconcile and become best of friends (of which T and the professor eventually became), perhaps the rest of the world can also find their restorative justice.

Hey Charlie

When T turned twenty-six, soon after he moved into his place in downtown Vancouver in 2002, now determined to make his ‘rock star dreams’ a reality, ‘Desert Moon’ was one of the songs he wrote. T had lived with HIV for six or seven years by now, and ‘Desert Moon’ encapsulates the feeling of isolation, marginalization, HIV stigma, and despair he had been feeling. A fan of Science Fiction since childhood, T imagines himself as an astronaut so disgusted with the fake people and corruption in his universal order; he finds an uninhabited desert moon to isolate himself and spend the rest of his days mourning his universe’s madness. He only has the artificial intelligence in his ship to talk to…

Desert Moon

The Southern Time Band is the ‘21st century social classical‘ for the cinematic rock opera ‘Southern Time’ that T wrote and, with his team, will soon begin to produce. Every popular rock opera has had a real band (with a real fanbase) performing the music accompanying the fictional drama (as in Pink Floyd’s ‘The Wall’ or The Who’s ‘Tommy’), or the rock band accompanying the fictional work is a fictional band (as in ‘Hedwig and the Angry Inch’) or a hired band (as in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’). The Southern Time Band is an original rock band, soon to garner its real fanbase, and the music it will create will accompany the ‘Southern Time Tetralogy.’ The Southern Time Tetralogy is a musical docudrama based on the true story of how T acquired and survived HIV and AIDS and the social and spiritual insights he gained because of contracting HIV. The STB’s first album ‘Lost in Love No More‘ serves as the ‘overture album’ to the cinematic tetralogy that will release over the 2020s.

Another grand purpose of this cadre of incredibly talented musicians is to help meet UNAIDS’ goal of ending AIDS by 2030. They will do this directly by helping reduce HIV stigma, as two members of the band (Justin and T) are openly HIV positive, and T survived AIDS. The stigma, people living with HIV face is one of the significant reasons globally why people still die from AIDS. The very fact of people, both HIV positive and negative, seeing ‘rock stars’ in the media, and listening to them on their devices or in concert, who are openly HIV positive, HIV stigma will automatically be reduced. Indirectly, the Southern Time Band will help end AIDS by donating a portion of everything they make to the Southern Time Foundation, whose primary purpose, at first, is to help end AIDS.

Time

Southern Time Band

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