Take Your Time

Spare me just one moment, won't you sing me a song?
I just need to hear your voice. I haven't heard you sing in so very long.

Stay, just a chorus? Or a verse, if you're there.

Maybe something I'd recognize or a long-forgotten air.

You said you just didn't have the time.

So here, take some of mine.

Because this could be the last chance to say it right,

so hold on tight and take your time. Take your time.

Sun rises like yeast on the hillside, slanting rays through the trees

and the song it awakens on my lips brings back such memories.

We were both so young, catching moths in the grass.

We've been through some hard times but the memories, they're finally coming back.

You said you just didn't have the time.

So here, take some of mine.

Because this could be the last chance to say it right,

so hold on tight and take your time.

This could be the last chance to say goodnight,

so hold on tight and take your time. Take your time.

This is a song I wrote a few years ago, and time has endeared this song to me rather than having desensitized me to it. There is nothing extremely special in the message. It says what it means essentially. This is a good companion song to "The Simple Things" because it has such a similar message, studded with some memories from my childhood: the slanting rays of sunlight through pine trees and catching moths in the grass on a warm summer night. It's always with reluctance that I look back to those times because I am afraid my memory is poor and I looking back I really can't see a child who was anything like what I have become. But these few images steal in, and it conjures up a momentary feeling in me that is not so nostalgic as much as it is curious. That probably doesn't make any sense.

I do remember once before I wrote this song, I used to drive myself and my brother to high school and it was on his large gray binder that I saw a phrase carved with a black pen. "Take My Time." I imagine it served as a reminder for him to not act hastily with anything, but I believe it was from this that I worked out the phrase, "You said you just didn't have the time. So here, take some of mine." Many of the songs I write begin that way, with a general idea, then a single clever line. There you've got the subject of the picture and all you need is to fill in a landscape behind it.