released November 16, 2022

Stumbling and exhausted from the cocktails earlier, I made my way down the damp armpit of Broadway. Summer was ending but the humidity lingered. Inside Little Caesars a single customer sat with a box of crazy bread and a large soft drink, her expressionless face glowing bright blue from a large smartphone. Across the street three young men burst out of a bodega and sprinted down the block. I passed by group of girls in shiny polychromatic dresses clicking their heels down the treacherous cracks of sidewalk.
“Are you sure she can get us in?”
“No worries. Cassandra has like 10k followers now.”

I stopped and lit a smoke and drew a puff then threw it to the ground and popped a stick of gum in instead. Across the street beneath the train tracks in the dim lamps you could just make out a sign: “Children of the Son C.O.G.I.C.” Beside it was the silhouette of a man on his knees seen from the front, his arms stretched outward and up, his hands clutching the air space above him in desolation. He gazed up into the sky. He sought an answer, but he was only a painting on a placard, forever locked in his pose of abject ruin. The door to the salon was propped open and there were lights on inside—people were in audible worship. I focused my attention through the portal and saw their pastor, captain of the congress. He sang into a microphone.
“The Spirit is calling! Calling in the night!” My ears tuned in attempting to sponge up the distorted vocals and backing track from the speakers mounted outside on either side of the doorway. I stepped to the curb contemplating crossing the street and a closer look when a big guy cruised by on his Honda Goldwing. The motorcycle lit up the block with LED-lighting, blaring Whitney Houston’s “Just the Lonely Talking Again” from a custom sound system. Then a train screeched overhead merging with the congregation and the street soup all at once.

I walked backward and stood for a moment next to the empty lot, and lit another cigarette that I didn’t want to smoke and took a drag. “I could go home and call her, she’d probably be up”, but the thought put an ache in the pit of my stomach. Or was it my lungs that were riddled with cancer? I turned and leaned into a chain link fence pressing my forehead into it. Its galvanized metal was rough and corroded. I sucked another storm cloud into my lungs and noticed the threatening sky over the townhouses. A fleeting wave of urgency came over me but without a sense of purpose it quickly faded to blues—I was just another hermit in the big city. To my left there was a pay phone and I laughed under my breath, “Does anyone carry change around anymore?” I suddenly panicked patting my pockets for my iPhone. “Ah thank God.” Same pocket as usual.

Just then the phone started ringing. I rummaged my jacket’s inner pocket and lifted my cell to answer, but it was black. I looked over at the ancient payphone and the receiver was almost ringing off the hook. I put my hand on it, gripped it, and waited. Silence. Then it exploded in another erratic vibration. I answered it and put it to my ear.

Soft static. And then—the sound of relaxed breathing. A woman’s voice began to speak low and clear.

“The doctor is out, but not for long,” she said. “I look for Lauren.”

“Who is this? You look for what?”

“I look for You. I follow orders,” she replied.

“Whose orders?” I asked more urgently.

“No one can crack the code and live to see—“

The line became inaudible as another train howled deafeningly overhead. When it had passed the line was humming at 440Hz—disconnected.

. . .

Adrian Knight’s new album “Carousel of Time” is here now. The curtains are drawn, but the sky, like the TV on the wall, is always watching. Mr. Knight has a telescope that is also a microscope for you. The signs are sparkling. Stars too. The index of unknowns is ever expanding, burning brighter with each new discovery. The songs patrol the ether that transcends scale and time: from oceans deep in thought, through unmarked doorways of dusty record stores, guided by a promise in the southern sky, toward dimensions and things that can’t be seen even in our wildest dreams...

Mr. Knight is not just another sad guitar man, except when he wants to be. He invites you into a dollhouse universe full of nebulous characters and objects that are never quite what they seem: the captain, overrun with gifts, seeking freedom in the screentime era; the comically self-obsessed bartender who’s locked himself in a store room, full of born again aspirations and regret; the dreamer and his creatures, prostrate, awaiting responses to their classifieds. Like you, all aboard the carousel of time.
-Nick Stevens