1/19/24: Time Stands Still (COVER: Dan Avidan & Super Guitar Bros)

The lead singer of "Ninja Sex Party" gets shockingly vulnerable.

I'm not looking back,
But I want to look around me now.
See more of the people
And the places that surround me now.

I’ve got a number of covers planned for this year, but even from the earliest days I knew I wanted to kick off with this heartfelt acoustic jam by Dan Avidan and Super Guitar Bros.

“Time Stand Still” is probably the only worthwhile track off Hold Your Fire—

—On the album, it has a hard-ish sound, but I love how this cover brushes away the grit and muscle.

I don’t know much about Dan Avidan, beyond what I’ve heard on Spotify and what Wikipedia tells me. But I do know that like Jack Black, he’s made his career from a certain kind of humor.

Maybe that’s why this cover hits me so hard. Strip away all the goofiness, and you’re left with really talented musicians playing a song very well. Dan’s voice is especially beautiful, especially on the high notes. I get goosebumps.

Now, some renditions of this song really lean hard into the melancholy, turning it into a mournful farewell song or a song of regrets. I feel that this cover really highlights the complexity of the narrator’s feelings. It’s not that he’s unable to stop moving, or that he would cease the journey he’s on, even if he could. It’s that he wants to be more present in the moment in which he exists—the juxtaposition of wanting both to linger and move on, competing emotions held at the same time.

It’s a great descriptor of what it’s like to parent young children. It’s not that I want them to stop getting older; after all, the point of parenthood is to ensure they get older! But no matter how great I know my kids will be tomorrow, I’m always going to wish I could have more of today with them, too.

In fact, the softness of this cover—the understated harmonies, the acoustic guitars, the xylophone on the bridge—always brings me back to when my kids were toddlers, when my husband used to play his guitar for them and they’d bang along on their toy xylophones or drums.