Bernie (Sarah Bernstein) and Kaycie Satterfield’s latest collaboration, “Keep,” alternates between creating moments of timelessness and evoking the march of days.

Appropriately, it’s a love music.

Considerably unusually, it’s a love music targeted on bizarre occasions.

The lyrics distinction love’s means of measuring time with commonplace measurements. The singer observes “Folks on the nook promoting roses / For the marriage and the funeral” – flowers to mark particular events, ceremonial junctures, begins and stops. However the singer decides, “I’ll purchase them and I’ll put them on the desk within the morning.” As a substitute of utilizing roses to mark beginnings and ends, love bestows them on the center. An bizarre morning turns into a ceremony, as a result of it is a chance to shock the beloved with flowers.

The verses have a jaunty strolling rhythm. This rhythm generates momentum that matches the lyrical deal with day by day exercise and time passing: “It’s humorous the way you blink after which it occurs.” Flower-sellers noticed, a transfer to California contemplated and perhaps undertaken: the current turns into the previous, and all of the sudden the long run is throughout.

 A rhythmic change on the refrain floats it free from the remainder of the music. Every measure of three beats feels self-contained; the rhythm isn’t actually going anyplace. There’s a sense of déjà vu, as if time is operating in a small three-beat loop as a substitute of in a line. As within the verses, this rhythmi selection emphasizes the lyric message: “Don’t keep for a second / keep for 100 years.”

This music’s sonic palette emphasizes the giddy velocity of time’s passage. It’s filled with digital bleeps and blips, the guitar distorted to the feel of freeway noise. The ambiance feels just like the set of a sci-fi film, some pastel-toned futuristic metropolis skyline, with this music taking part in out of the window of a flying automotive. The suggestion: let’s nonetheless be collectively when the world feels like this.

The request (or instruction) is to not keep without end, just one hundred years. That’s nonetheless a very long time, a full cycle, lengthy sufficient for all the things to vary.

However it exists inside time; there may be an expiration date.

100 years is simply previous what’s cheap to hope for in a human lifespan, proper on the sting of being potential, however not fairly inside attain for somebody already sufficiently old to write down a love music.

What’s the purpose in asking for one thing not possible? Aren’t you organising your beloved to allow you to down? Doesn’t asking for like to be counted out in centuries undermine this music’s celebration of day by day moments?

Perhaps while you ask for the not possible, you’ll be able to name it into precise being. It’s not potential for the singer’s beloved to stay round for so long as requested, however they might discover it essential to invent a means. The sting of what’s potential is stretched in love. Even when all you’re asking is that somebody nonetheless be there within the morning, you’re asking them to create a shared future. Asking somebody to remain, not simply “for a second” however for the lengthy haul, is asking them to make the long run actual.