On ‘Are We Running Out Of Time?,’ Sotto James confronts a realisation that can arrive almost
without warning: the people who have always been there will not be there forever.
Written with his father in mind, the song does not emerge from a particular loss or dramatic event.
Instead, it captures the quieter, more unsettling moment when Sotto begins to understand that their relationship, something once assumed to be permanent, is bound by time.
That awareness first appears as something sensed rather than seen.
“It’s right around the bend,” Sotto sings in the opening verse, describing a presence that remains perpetually out of reach but impossible to ignore.
Time becomes something almost physical: approaching, following and waiting just beyond the frame.
The recording gives that anxiety room to develop.
Beginning in a state of exposed suspension, the arrangement gradually gathers weight around Sotto’s vocals.
Its patient, mid-tempo pulse continues underneath him as the production expands from intimacy into a spacious full-band crescendo.
Rather than following a simple path from quiet to loud, the song repeatedly advances and retreats.
Moments of growing intensity collapse into sudden pockets of space; rhythmic momentum gives way to near-absence before the band returns with even greater force.
The effect mirrors the thought at the centre of the song; suppressed for a moment, then returning more urgently than before.
Against that increasingly expansive backdrop, Sotto focuses on the smallest shared details
“Counting trees as we pass them by
I will hold you closer to me
I just wish we had more time.”
There is no grand farewell in the scene. Father and son are simply travelling together, watching the landscape move past the window.
Its emotional force comes from the intrusion of impermanence into an otherwise ordinary moment: an awareness that even the experiences we barely notice while they are happening will one day become precious.
That tension runs throughout ‘Are We Running Out Of Time?.’
Sotto wants to remain present, yet cannot stop imagining what lies ahead. The title is repeated not as a question he expects to answer, but as one he is unable to put down.
“Counting trees as we pass them by
I will hold you closer to me
I just wish we had more time.”
The relationship becomes more complicated still when he sings:
“Every time I see your face
I am staring back at mine.”
In those lines, love and fear become inseparable. The song is therefore not only about losing somebody else; it is also about understanding life through the person who came before you.
Musically, the final third gives that conflict its most powerful expression.
After the arrangement withdraws into its most fragile passage, the full band returns in a cathartic surge.
It does not suggest that time has been defeated. Instead, it transforms fear into a decision: to move closer, to remain at someone’s side and to value what can still be held.
That sense of presence gives the song its tenderness.
“I will be there at your side” is not a promise to prevent the inevitable, but a commitment to what we can do with the time that remains.
As the song reaches its conclusion, the full arrangement falls away and the music recedes into a wide, lingering outro.
There is no clean resolution. The sound itself appears to run out, leaving the title’s question suspended in the silence that follows.
