Now is the Time
The back cover of Chris Ronald’s "Timeline" shows a young boy sitting in front of a pedestal turntable with a smoked grey plastic bubble top in a teak paneled rec room, reading the album tracks on an LP label. The front cover shows that same boy grown into a man; it is Ronald, himself. And indeed, Timelines unfolds as a personal journey, but it is a journey of a certain age. When I was young, my best friend had a turntable with a plastic bubble for a cover, and my parents teak paneling in the rec room. For me, "Timeline" is home.
For others, what will resonate is the musicianship, and on "Timeline", it is stellar incorporating some of Vancouver’s finest session musicians: John Ellis on guitar, Rob Becker on bass, Pat Steward on drums, Mike Sanyshan on fiddle, and Ronald himself on guitar, mouth organ and of course, singing. But it is Ronald’s lyrics that make this album the gem that it is. Like Al Stewart or Lyle Lovett, Ronald captivates with his word choice. It is no fluke that Ronald was nominated as CFMA English songwriter of the year for this cd.
I am a big Chris Ronald fan, both the person and the musician, and Timeline is filled with the insight and joy I find in both. “The Sneeze” is just plain fun, “Twenty Little Stars” (about the school killings in Sandy Hook) poignant and sadly long eclipsed by 82 other school shooting tragedies since, “Chaperone” an ode to his wife as they embarked on the journey that brought them from the UK to Canada. Three tracks, however, stand out. It is not that they are the “best”: taste is by definition subjective. Rather, it is that in the timeline that is our life, songs and lyrics resonate in oscilloscopic frequencies that move us deeply today and perhaps not tomorrow, while other songs resonate for other with equal vibrancy. For my friend with the bubble turntable, it is “Ducks in a Row.” Looking at his life with wistful eyes, all I can say is "who knew?" Indeed, that is the point of the song.
“The Mountaineer” is the story of its VIA Rail namesake as it winds its way from Vancouver through the river canyons and high plateaus of British Columbia into the Rocky Mountains and Jasper, Alberta (a name I can’t write without thinking John Denver). In my youth this route was my often-companion, and Ronald’s writing is so crisp, so clean, so evocatively precise that I can see each bend in the rails and each lake that he passes, and when I close my eyes, a Jasper station appearing in morning mists incensed with pine and spruce.
“The Busker” unfolds as an ode to Ronald himself, who busked to help finance this project. But Ronald is no different than the 100s of others who busk around the world, and he knows that fraternity well. When Ronald sings "He always has a smile, for every captivated child, seems like they’re the only ones that understand", the sentiment bites and I see myself as a nine year old in the late 60s, seated with parents and grand-parents in a coffee house in Vancouver’s Gastown; a wooden floor, wooden chairs, and a solitary folksinger with long hair and a buckskin jacket singing to anyone willing to listen past their own conversations. Few were, and when we stood to leave and our chair legs grated against the floor, we caught eyes and he smiled and nodded. 50 years later, I still remember, and still want a buckskin jacket.
“Give It Time” opens with haunting John Ellis guitar licks evocative of Tom Waits’ “Real Gone” before Ronald asks the questions that appears on our lips in our most vulnerable, solitary moments: Will it get better? Where did it all go? But it is not an abstract “our” that Ronald is concerned about. It is him, and it is you and it is me: our collective individuality held before our own mirror of self-doubt and self-questioning in the face of aspirations touched upon and then left tantalizingly far away, and being lost in the reflection. “Give it Time” is about the artist who has lost the muse, a song writer full of talent struggling to create and seeing only the failures of the moment and not the successes they will lead to, but the genre of the artist is moot. The song that lies crumpled on the floor is our dreams and aspirations, whether we are a singer or a painter or a fish monger. It takes a person of a certain age to wonder these questions: youth is too brimming in unsquashed promise to wonder if it will ever come back. And much like Mother Mary for McCartney, Ronald’s advice to this moment is simple and pure and in the final analysis true: give it time.
Give "Timeline" time. You will not regret it. And who knows? You might be like me, and find yourself singing "the busker wears his heart upon his sleeve" as you make your way to the secondhand stereo shop in search of that Realistic receiver with the brushed champagne gold finish you replaced earlier in your timeline.
