Three years after the first recorded version of Sandy Denny’s “Who Knows Where The Time Goes?” in 1966, Fairport Convention’s “Unhalfbricking” album is released and the song finds its most exquisite form.
To me it’s a Sunday afternoon in autumn – it’s everything about that moment, both literally and in metaphor. It’s mourning for the summer, feeling the winter draw in. It’s the end of the carnival but the beginning of a real intimacy. And it’s time, time, time, relentless and unstoppable. Denny wrote the song at age 19, sang this version at 22, died nine years later.
“I have no fear of time.” You could see it as cruelly ironic, given subsequent events, but there’s the twist: Not only is the track as vital and strong and gorgeous as the day it came out, but the sentiment of it – the weariness, the resilience, the acceptance – is peculiarly ageless. In a parallel universe, Denny is alive and well and 77 this year, still perched in front of the winter fire, still wondering where the time has gone.