How 'Time' Uses Clocks and Alarms to Capture the Shock of Growing Older

The opening of “Time” isn’t just a sound effect — it’s a philosophical punch. Engineer Alan Parsons recorded dozens of clocks in an antique shop, then layered them with alarm bells from a friend’s bedside clock. The result is a chaotic, overlapping wall of ticks and rings that hits the listener like a jolt of caffeine, mimicking the exact moment you realize years have slipped away unnoticed.

That feeling of lost time is driven home by the lyric “The sun is the same in a relative way but you’re older.” It’s a sneaky bit of Einstein-lite: the sun doesn’t care about your birthday. It rises and sets the same way it did when you were ten, but your relationship to it has changed because you’ve aged. The universe is steady; you’re the one running out of minutes.