Let’s set some things straight: Yes, we’re barely one year removed from Dylan Balliett’s last album as Spirit Night, August 2023’s Bury the Dead. No, that album hasn’t since been re-released as a “deluxe issue” with, like, one B-side lazily tacked on at the end of the record. Yes, his new album Time Won’t Tell borrows lyrical and musical themes from that last record. No, the two projects Balliett refers to as “sister” releases don’t constitute an “era.” There is something similarly nostalgic ingrained in nearly every corner of both of these albums, though, and it goes far beyond this refusal to engage with the modern marketing of new music—as we heard on Time Won’t Tell’s lead single “Darker Now,” each track on the new record feels as much like a personal photo album for the songwriter as it does a journey through his high-school Case Logic, as discernible elements of Springsteen, Dunedin twang, and the simpler times they elicit feel baked into the single’s clanging riffs.
Yet where Bury the Dead went maximal, Time Won’t Tell strives to do the opposite. On this record—which clocks in at under 30 minutes—Balliett found inspiration in what he refers to as “little songs”: “simple, folk-adjacent, cheaply recorded, and short in length” recordings, as he puts it, “with a focus on lyrics and vocal melodies and minimal production choices.” The second single, “26,” demonstrates this perfectly over the course of its relatively epic five-minute run time as its spare instrumentation leaves plenty of space for the record’s most gutting vignette, which takes the pop-punk cliché of fretting about entering your mid-twenties and turns it on its head through the simple creative choice of second-person narration. Additionally, the composition of these “little songs” is key, making them mutable to fit any and all arrangements. Think Spencer Krug recording “City Wrecker” twice, three years apart, under the same moniker—first as a solo piano ballad, then as a kraut-tinged space-rock jam led by a funky bass line courtesy of Finnish prog-electronic outfit Siinai.
Which is all to say that his influences on both records go far beyond his apparent affection for Nebraska and Cleaners From Venus. With the latter release arriving this Friday, we asked Balliett to take us a bit deeper into his inspiration for the record, which involved picking apart longtime favorites and recent discoveries alike ranging from Durutti Column to Mirah to palm-wine musician S.E. Rogie. “Most of the songs I’ll mention on this list weren’t actively inspiring me as I sat down to work on my album,” he explains, “but are rather so deeply rooted in my musical subconscious that I will sometimes notice them coming out in my songs after the fact.”
With that in mind, check out his playlist (which also barely cracks the 30 minute mark) below. Additionally, you can pre-order Time Won’t Tell ahead of its release on October 4 here.
Hüsker Dü, “Chartered Trips”
Most of the songs I’ll mention on this list weren’t actively inspiring me as I sat down to work on my album, but are rather so deeply rooted in my musical subconscious that I will sometimes notice them coming out in my songs after the fact. “Chartered Trips” is the perfect example of a song like that. When I first heard it as a teenager, I thought I’d discovered the blueprint for all the other music I loved at the time, and at this point it’s made it into my own musical DNA. I think the song “Another War” on my new album sounds a little like “Chartered Trips” if it were played by Sugar instead of Hüsker Dü, if that makes any sense to anyone.
The Bats, “Calm Before the Storm”
All Spirit Night music since the very beginning has been heavily influenced by Kiwi-pop, but I think “Darker Now” from the new record is the most overt example to date. You could easily compare it to any number of the Kiwi-pop bands I’m obsessed with—The Clean, The Verlaines, The Chills—but to me it sounds, above all else, like The Bats—particularly when the vocal harmonies come in during the second verse. I chose “Calm Before the Storm” from their debut album Daddy’s Highway for this playlist because it most closely demonstrates the ways in which I’m ripping them off, but I’m generally inspired by that album as a whole more than by any specific song. It’s a remarkable record.
Durutti Column, “Otis”
This song absolutely blows my mind every time I hear it. It also does weird stuff to my heart. I don’t know another song so human and so alien, so futuristic and so embedded in the past, so cold and warm at the same time. The disembodied vocal samples recorded at different times in history interacting or just floating past each other in this wide-open, sparkling, otherworldly space is almost too much for me to bear. Please play it at my funeral at least once.
For my song “Bertie,” I stole the idea of having a repetitive melodic loop function as the rhythm track from “Otis,” and I got away with it, too, since everyone I sent the song to told me it “has Arthur Russell vibes” and nothing else. I also added bent guitar harmonics as a further nod to “Otis.” They otherwise don’t sound anything alike, but that’s why I’m telling you about it now.
Kate Bush, “Hounds of Love”
When I was growing up in West Virginia in the 1990s, my parents owned a CD store called Intergalactic Garage that specialized in Kate Bush collectibles and rarities—which sounds fake now that I’ve typed it out. It was real, though, and I mention it by name in case anyone else out there remembers it. One might imagine this meant I heard a lot of Kate Bush’s music growing up, but my parents weren’t necessarily spinning her records all the time by the mid-’90s and, as a rebellious youth, I wasn’t necessarily seeking out the music of my parents (keep in mind, they sold Green Day CDs, too, and they were easy to “borrow”).
Eventually, I heard “Cloudbusting” in a Kate Bush–themed early Macintosh HyperCard game that my dad showed me in high school (listen, I already said I know this stuff sounds fake), and from then on I was hooked. I love all of her music now, but I’m especially inspired by her albums The Dreaming and Hounds of Love—the title track of which I’ve chosen to include on this playlist because of its influence on the arrangements of my song “26.” Both songs feature dreamy synthesizers and romantic vocals floating above massive, menacing drum loops that repeat relentlessly from start to finish. The drums on “A.M.” were also inspired by Kate, but more loosely as a thing I imagined she might do.
S.E. Rogie, “My Lovely Elizabeth”
S.E. Rogie’s Palm Wine Guitar Music has been a constant in my life ever since Deakin (I’ll be honest, it could’ve been Geologist) recommended it as an example of good African music on the Animal Collective message board sometime around 2006. Very simple and beautiful guitar-and-vocal music that always has a twinge of heartbreaking melancholy lurking right beneath the surface, even if it often turns out he’s just singing about being horny. “My Lovely Elizabeth” is my favorite of his songs, and it’s not about being horny; it’s one of the great unrequited love songs of all time. While I don’t do any African fingerpicking on my songs and try not to sing in any questionable accents, I’m definitely always trying to capture that same feeling the music of S.E. Rogie gives me to pass on to others. “After Germany,” the first song on Time Won’t Tell, is heavily influenced by S.E. Rogie in the repetitiveness of its bright lead guitar figure and the melodicism of the vocal line versus the words I’m singing. It’s one of my many attempts to see how sweet I can make “bittersweet.”
Mirah, “La Familia”
I first conceived of Time Won’t Tell as an album of “little songs” in opposition to the “big songs” of its sister album, last year’s Bury the Dead, which had a sort of Wall of Sound production style that made each song sound, fittingly, like a Spirit Night stadium anthem. I don’t have a perfect definition of what a “little song” is, but I know them when I hear them. They’re usually simple, folk-adjacent, cheaply recorded, and short in length, with a focus on lyrics and vocal melodies and minimal production choices; they’re also usually so well-written they could be covered or re-recorded successfully in any number of arrangements.
Daniel Johnston wrote a lot of little songs, Liz Phair’s Exile in Guyville is a little song album, most of the Guided by Voices lo-fi stuff probably qualifies—but my mind immediately went to the Mirah album You Think It’s Like This But Really It’s Like This, an album I loved in high school. That album is filled with catchy little pop gems, more than half of which are less than two and a half minutes long, that are deceptively simple but will stay with you for decades, as I’ve learned. “After Germany” was the first song I worked on for Time Won’t Tell and it was heavily inspired by this Mirah album in general, but especially the fifth track, “La Familia.”
Blaze Foley, “If I Could Only Fly”
I only heard this incredible song for the first time within the past five years or so, which was a startling experience for me as a seasoned music obsessive who assumed I’d already heard the vast majority of existent songs that were going to change my life at that point. It makes me wonder how many of my favorite songs I still haven’t heard. I’m not certain, but I feel like the experience of learning “If I Could Only Fly” on guitar and playing it over and over in my room during the pandemic must have rubbed off on my song “26”—which I would never compare to Foley’s song, but which does use the same chords and has a similar timeless quality to its form.
Sybille Baier, “Tonight”
I was thinking of a couple different artists when I wrote my song “Wendy”—Leonard Cohen, Vashti Bunyan—but mostly I was thinking of Sybille Baier and her album Colour Green for its very specific and unique vibe. She’s able to perfectly balance darkness and light in her melancholy folk songs in the same way that I was attempting to do with “Wendy.” I’m including the opening track from Colour Green here simply because it’s a damn banger.
Brian Eno, “The Big Ship”
This song sounds like leaving Earth, and I leave Earth every time I listen to it. If you listen to my album, I’m sure you’ll notice at least a couple parts that were inspired by “The Big Ship.”
The Velvet Underground, “After Hours”
I love when albums are capped off with songs that feel almost like epilogues or palate cleansers, something slightly disconnected from the rest of the album that leaves you with a different feeling than the rest of what you’d been listening to right before it. “After Hours” from The Velvet Underground’s third album is the best and most immediate example of this I could think of, especially coming after the nine-minute experimental track “Murder Mystery.” When I received the final mix for “Somebody’s Going to Love You,” I immediately dragged it to the end of the working Time Won’t Tell playlist because it tied a bow around the package of all the other songs before it, just like “After Hours” does. Also, I wasn’t thinking of it at the time, but I can’t help but notice the similar sentiment between the songs in the line “Oh, someday, I know someone will look into my eyes and say, ‘Hello, you're my very special one.’” It’s such a sweet little song and, considering its influence on the indie-pop genre, probably more influential on my album than I’m even giving it credit for here.
