Who Knows Where The Time Goes?

I have contributed to a programme on the song ‘Who Knows Where The Time Goes’, part of Radio 4’s series Soul Music. The programme airs at 9:00am on Wednesday 14 June, then again at 9:30pm the same evening; it will also be available to download on the Radio 4 website.

The song was written by Sandy Denny, who recorded it with The Strawbs, Fairport Convention and as a solo artist. It was made famous by Judy Collins’s 1968 cover and has been covered by scores of artists since. I first attempted to write about it when researching the music of Nina Simone, who recorded a haunting version in 1969. Hearing Simone’s rendition helped formulate my thoughts about the representation of time, age and experience. I included a comparison of the Fairport and Simone versions in my book Nina Simone. I then ended up writing about ‘Who Knows Where The Time Goes’ again as an essay for Catherine Haworth and Lisa Colton’s collection Gender, Age and Musical Creativity, this time taking a slightly different perspective and also including discussion of Judy Collins’s version. Later, the song became the starting point for The Late Voice, my longest attempt to deal with the time/age/experience nexus.

It’s one of my favourite songs and I think about it differently each time I take the time to reflect on it again. So it was when I sat down in Newcastle’s BBC Studio to record my contribition to Soul Music, where I found myself emphasising aspects of the sound I’d never really tried to articulate before, such as the absolute vitality of Richard Thompson’s guitar in the Fairport version on Unhalfbricking, which I always heard as important but now hear as being an equal lead voice to Denny’s on that timeless recording. Now, as I write these words and think again about the song, I dwell on the way that the song itself models the passing of time (which admittedly, I’ve written quite extensively on before) and how that is best exemplfied in the way that the refrain’s most obvious rhyming words (‘knows’ and ‘goes’) are preceded by one and three words respectively, making an uneven and therefore memorable rhythm.

Perhaps finding something different to think about each time I reflect on the song maps onto the experience of time more generally: the recurrence of the familiar enhanced by the emergence of the hitherto unknown, or at least unformulated.