I am Oak - Time Drifts (CD)
PRE-ORDER 'TIME DRIFTS' ON CD & VINYL
Out April 4, 2025
“Time Drifts was made after a period of pause. Letting the torrent of the album-and-tour-cycle I was in from around 2010 up to the Corona outbreak in 2020 settle, to catch my breath. After losing the urgency to write for a while in a post-COVID dip, I slowly opened up to writing songs without expectations—however much that is possible—and found joy and comfort in the act of creation again.
This pause led to a kind of reflective writing. After finishing about half of the songs on the album I realized there was a pattern in my writings: one of observation. I was writing about things I had experienced as an observer, or a spectator, as though I was seeing things unfold from a (safe) distance. A global pandemic, a couple of deaths in the family, social/political unrest, war, all sorts of things you can’t exercise any direct influence over. Nonetheless, it influences you. You can reflect on it, but you can’t act on it, so you have to let it play out. The world keeps revolving. Time will keep passing.
The (post-)Corona period revealed a great social and political divide—which, of course, had always been there, but was now magnified. This encouraged me to expand on ideas about the way we see things through our own perspective and the individual experience of life that comes with it, and let that seep into the songs. Time Drifts deals with personal thoughts and struggles at its center, but also tries to elevate these ideas to represent the bigger, universal, and generational questions about life and purpose people deal with.
Sonically, Time Drifts feels almost like an (accidental) revisit of everything I’ve done before, but filtered through my current self and added to with new instruments, elements, and aspects to make something that sounds both familiar and new. Each song explores a different sonic territory, but there is an overlap. The songs are like islands in that sense, but all part of the same archipelago.”
– Thijs Kuijken, I am Oak