Growing up in rural Wendell, Massachusetts, Sen Morimoto found a rust-ridden abandoned car deep in the woods behind their parents’ house. Two decades later, the car was still there — though its origin still remains a mystery to Morimoto, now 32. It takes center stage in the music video for “Overthinker,” the lead single off their new time-bending album out Friday.
“As a kid, it was something that really fascinated me because there’s no roads,” the artist explained. “How did this car get into the middle of the woods?”
Morimoto collapses past and present on their new album, “Time Is On Your Side,” reflecting on the 13 years since they moved from Massachusetts to Chicago. In that time the Japanese-American musician has released three studio albums, found a firm footing in Chicago’s independent music community and, in 2018, became co-owner of local indie label Sooper Records, which celebrated its 10th anniversary earlier this year.
“Time Is On Your Side” is Morimoto’s first public release in nearly three years; the artist took a break from releasing new music after their industry-critiquing album “Diagnosis” in 2023, but noted they’re constantly making music all the while.
“I’ve had a lot of friends tell me they’re surprised I’m putting out music again,” they said. “I didn’t realize maybe I was giving off such a vibe that I had totally quit.”
A few months into the break, Morimoto got back into the studio with collaborator Brok Mende, audio engineer at Friends of Friends Recording in Humboldt Park, armed with a general idea of working on a new project and no timetable.
“That was sort of the goal from the beginning of it, to force time into the equation,” Morimoto said, adding, “by not allowing the pressure of being in the studio to make you act quickly and skip over some of the details. I started feeling like this is a project that means something to me as a specific concept around time and how I’m using it.”
Exploring themes of time, memory, friendship and community, the album takes a more straightforward, folk-inspired approach than their usual bombastic, experimental multi-genre sound. Morimoto utilizes time “as an ingredient” in the project; they interpolate a line from 2018 song “I Just Spoke to Mama” on “Overthinker,” use multiple time signatures at once on second single “Chewing Gum,” slow down while performing the title track live and channel sounds buried in nostalgia.
“A lot of the project is about how time feels so relative,” Morimoto said. “Different parts of your life feel long, and something that feels long to you could feel like a millisecond to someone else.”
“Every chance I got to flip time on its head, even just as an inside joke to myself, felt really fun on this album,” they explained.
For Morimoto, “Time Is On Your Side,” like all of their music, is strongly rooted in community. In addition to Mende, the album pulls collaborators including fellow Chicago musician KAINA, who is their fiancé, guitarist Elijah Bradford and drummer, producer and DJ Ryan the Person.
“Every time I’m working on a new project, I have to sit down and remind myself why I’m doing these things,” the artist said. “I always come back to the recording sessions and the rehearsals as a band, and the traveling together, and those connections and how blessed we are to have a space to be creative in. In that sense, community is really the whole thing.”
Morimoto hopes the album will prompt listeners to slow down and take a breath.
“I just hope that people feel like it can be a nice reminder whenever you’re stressed and you feel like things are moving too quickly,” they said. “You could put the record on and remember that you have all the time in the world.”