“Pieces of Time” was recorded in 1985, landed on a College Music Journal compilation, drew interest from Columbia Records, and then the band dissolved. The song is now being reissued 40 years later by the original members, who reunited with their original producer Marvin Etzioni to make new music before anyone thought to release what they’d already made. The subject of the song is the splintering effect of time. The biography is doing the same thing.
Lee Oser’s lyric is structured around a recurring interruption. Each verse builds toward a sustained vision: a spaceship settling on a world where someone is always near, a spring meeting on a hill with winter’s unquietness finally forgotten, riches and songs known by heart, desires held intact. Then the clock chimes, and it changes his mind. The dream doesn’t shatter dramatically. It just yields to something more honest.
“We’re so scared of pieces of time” is the line Oser keeps returning to, and the song earns its repetition by making each verse’s vision feel genuinely desired rather than naively held. The spaceship verse has a quality of willed optimism that the lyric neither endorses nor dismisses. The clock doesn’t say the dream is wrong. It just says time is the condition that everything else has to exist inside.
Kevin Jarvis’s drumming, which Oser singles out with affection in his notes about the song, carries the track’s momentum in a way that keeps the interruptions from feeling defeatist. The folk-inflected indie rock production from Etzioni has the warmth of something made with care by people who knew what they were building, even if they couldn’t have known it would take this long to reach anyone. “Ever young and ever old” arrives in the final verse before the clock chimes once more. Both things, all at once, until it stops.
B-Side Guys 
Leave a Reply