Bittersweet Symphony
Tim Bowness finished work on his new album, Late Night Laments, on the day lockdown was announced. A self-professed news junkie, he had seen the pandemic coming early. “I was aware of it from the very early reports in China,” he says. “I’d seen articles and said to my partner: ‘This could be the year unfolding.’”
The timing was purely coincidental. If there was any urgency, it came from the desire to complete a project he had spent months obsessing over rather than the prospect of massive societal upheaval. Because, as Tim Bowness will tell you himself, he’s nothing if not obsessive. “To the point where it would drive other people crazy,” he says with a laugh.
Yet with , Bowness has made an album for the times. It never explicitly references lockdown or the pandemic itself, but its nine intimate, self-contained songs reflect the existential detachment of enforced isolation. Lyrically, it address the big, bleak topics in small, beautiful ways: death, loss, failure, rejection, missed opportunities and unfulfilled promise. It’s populated by the
