Time and Tide Wait for No Man

Veteran guitarist, singer/songwriter, and producer Marcus Nand’s first fully realized solo album is a set of eleven lushly produced songs exploring a life of travel, music—especially guitar music—and self-discovery. Born in England to a Fiji Indian father and an English mother, Nand had an early awakening when he began living in Spain and discovered flamenco, an emotional and stylistic touchstone that has shaped his life ever since. Nand’s remarkable career in music spans heavy metal, electronica, pop, and roles in a variety of bands in Los Angeles, Mexico City, and Malaga, Spain, where he has spent much time soaking up Mediterranean culture with its rich ties to both southern Europe and North Africa. Nand’s early-2000s band Ziroq was a landmark in flamenco-rock fusion. But “Time and Tide Wait for No Man” goes further, distilling the diverse elements of Nand’s unique life and musical education in a way we can all share and appreciate. “Now I understand the whole journey,” says Nand. “And it’s not just geographical. The traveling isn’t always from place to place. It’s more about finding your own place and your own style.” The style Nand creates here is rich and complex, incorporating a wide range of influences to arrive at a highly personal sound. His guitar palette is expansive, from gently picked nylon string arpeggios, to soaring volleys of slide guitar, jangling vamps of energized steel-string strumming, and overtone-rich walls of surging electric sonority. His tenor voice is strong and animated, with an appealing, raspy edge, the perfect vehicle for wise songs of love, hope, friendship, and loss. Nand’s preference for minor keys may reflect his life in flamenco, a genre marked by urgency and melancholy. “I don’t know any major keys,” he quips. But the emotional shading here is anything but downbeat. “Minor keys give the music a reflective quality,” he says, “and that atmosphere helps listeners reflect on their own lives.” Creating a solo album has been a consuming ambition for Nand. Over the past three years, he has nurtured these songs from simple guitar and voice creations to elaborately crafted studio set pieces. Through every stage, from creation to rehearsal, through all the phases of recording and mixing, the songs have evolved and changed, like living things. “You rewrite stuff until it works,” says Nand. “It doesn’t matter how close you are to it, or how great you think it is; if it doesn’t work, you have to rewrite it until it does.” Nand lived with the album’s title song for years as a spare ballad, accompanied only by his guitar. But in the studio, the time signature changed, and the song blossomed into a swelling, radiant anthem of yearning ambition whose sound and message define this album: “Trust in yourself / Believe in your dreams / And you will fly.” The warmth of a Beatles refrain echoes here, one of many vaguely familiar resonances that wind through these tracks. As Nand’s germinal songs grew into full productions, he was delighted by the jogging of musical memories, the layers of inspiration and influence he found emerging from the sonic textures he was creating. The song “Time and Tide Wait for No Man” neatly sums up Nand’s overall achievement on this album. “When you forge your own way as an individual,” he says, “you have to do it all each time. The older you get, the more urgent it becomes. You have to finish things before time runs out.” The urgency of time passing, the urgency of flamenco, the urgency of the creative process—these are the strands that unify these songs. Yet each is different. “Love, Lust or Confusion?” is a chiming rock anthem about the intoxication and romance of travel with its fleeting, intense intimacies. “The Prize” celebrates the fruits of a journey—whether spiritual awakening, the love of a person, or some material reward. Uilleann pipes played by Eric Rigler add a plaintive flavor to the mix and, for Nand, the feel of a maritime excursion. “Along the Way” is an ambling flamenco ode to long-term friendship. This is one of the few pieces on which Nand does not play all the guitars. The rhythm section is powered by three live-tracked rhythm guitarists, real life long-term friends from Nand’s flamenco adventures in Spain. “They have a feel that I don’t,” says Nand, “an authentic, hypnotic rhythm guitar sound.” “Tarifa,” with its jazz harmonies and its vivid word portrait of Spain’s southernmost city, just across the strait from Morocco, also incorporates an authentic sonic element—the raspy voice of a traditional male flamenco singer, recorded on location in a blacksmith’s foundry, the scene of many long jam sessions during Nand’s forays into music in Spain. “You Become My World,” an intimate love ballad, features spectacular vocals from brilliant young Leabanese-American vocalist Mayssa Karaa. The song’s open sensuality may raise eyebrows in Karaa’s motherland, but Nand notes that the Arabic words she sings so gloriously are quite innocent: “You put a spell on my heart and my world.” Ever mindful of his deep connections to Spain and Mexico, Nand includes two Spanish language songs, a lively cover of Jose Gabriel Gentile’s “Cuando Amamos” featuring Nand’s prowess on nylon-string guitar, and “Los Ojos del Mundo,” which also appears in its original English version, “Eyes of the World.” Nand wrote this song in Madrid during the chaos following the 2004 subway bombing there. Having passed through the affected station the day before the bombing, Nand was personally rocked by this event, and channeled his emotions into this powerful, brooding song, with its refrain, “We won’t run and we won’t hide. We won’t bend and we won’t break.” Nand says of these songs, “I have lived every word.” And it shows. This is the essence of authentic songwriting—sincere personal statements presented with such confidence and clarity that all can share in them. All the better that they are delivered here by such a worldly and diversely talented guitar maestro.