When COVID-19 hit the states in March 2020, any live plans for Timmy Sean & The Celebrities or Sir Video were iced. Locked in their respective studios, Timmy reached out to Perdomo, as well as Nick Bertling who had drummed with Sir Video on their 2016 east coast tour, to collaborate on some remote projects to pass the time. Within a week Shelter Skelter was born. The first video received over 10k views in a few days. Within a month, the trio’s “Coronavirus Rhapsody” video had gained over 150k views.
By early April though, Timmy had began to map out a new album. Little did he know that he was jumping into his most ambitious project to date, a project that would dominate every day of his next nine months.
A decade after the release of multi-instrumentalist/producer/songwriter Timmy Sean’s 2010 debut solo album, Songs From & Inspired By Noisewater ("One of the decade's most impressive pop discs” ~Absolute Pop), comes his long awaited full-length follow up, a 2020-inspired rock opera entitled A Tale From The Other Side.
Written, performed, and recorded quarantining in his Los Angeles home studio during the pandemic of 2020, Tale marks a return back to Timmy’s rock ’n roll roots. After spending the last five years fronting his synthpop/funk band Sir Video, while also working as a “hired gun” multi-instrumentalist (performing both regularly on the east coast with the NJ-based Mahoney Brothers, and in Los Angeles, backing up everyone from Sugar Ray’s Mark McGrath and Poison’s Bret Michaels to performances sharing the stage with people as diverse as SNL alum Will Forte to LA Mayor Eric Garcetti), the new album finds Timmy back in the studio as a one-man-band, playing in the sandbox of some of his earliest influences such as The Beatles, ELO, Weezer, Oasis, and Ben Folds. And while one may describe the bulk of the album as pop-rock or powerpop, he’s also clearly rediscovered his self-described “teenage love for heavy distortion and guitar solos,” at moments, fully embodying the progressive and harder rock sounds of Soundgarden, Foo Fighters, Dream Theater, and even Metallica.
With the COVID-19 pandemic clearing his schedule of live performances and touring for the first time since he was 18, Timmy found himself in the spring of 2020 locked down in his newly-built home studio in LA with a pile of song ideas - some brand new, some dating back a half-dozen years - but all mostly lyric-less. Faced with a blank notebook to pull together his first proper solo album in a decade, instead of just composing a collection of unrelated songs, Timmy decided he would give a shot at writing something he had always wanted to attempt to create…
A rock opera.
Though he drew heavily from both classic rock operas like Pink Floyd’s The Wall and The Who’s Tommy, as well as modern takes on the genre like Green Day’s American Idiot and My Chemical Romance’s The Black Parade that all tell a complete narrative, Timmy’s biggest spark came when he heard Butch Walker’s newly released American Love Story for the first time, an emotional, political, funny, heartfelt story about Red and Blue America in 2020. Timmy instantly began to sketch out a fictional tale, a loose allegory of all of the strange current events that were happening in the world, but especially the domestic turmoil bubbling over in the USA (hence the red, white and blue color motif of the album’s artwork.) If Butch Walker’s American-inspired rock opera was a small-scale love story indie film, this was aiming to be a giant supernatural thriller blockbuster.
He began to pull from his love of television, film, and classic horror short stories. Stephen King and Stranger Things meets Dawn Of The Dead and Tarantino. Lost and The Twilight Zone and Lord Of The Rings and Thriller and Edgar Allen Poe. They all started seeping into the outline. Episodes of The Sopranos and Darren Aronofsky’s mother! and Planet Of The Apes and A Star Is Born (the original 1937 version and 2018’s) and The Wizard Of Oz and kaiju films. The coronavirus became a monster attacking from the sea. Angry political mobs became a zombie army. “The Other Side” became a metaphor for a million different ideas, from political views, to death and afterlife, to new found perspectives. And the lead role morphed into an alter-ego Timmy briefly took on with his high school-formed band LUZER in the early 00’s: a young rock star named Guy Scorpio.
As the real world madness of 2020 grew, Timmy continued to put it into the album, writing more and more new songs, blowing right through the self-imposed November release date deadline of the aptly chosen Friday The 13th. But after numerous different endings to the album failed to meet his satisfaction, in early December, Timmy finally cracked the ending with a pair of brand new tracks: Come Back Alive and I’ve Returned.
After eight months of writing and recording in lockdown, he had finally locked down the album’s track listing.
Though he refuses to overtly spell out the meaning of the final few tracks on A Tale From The Other Side, the climax of a long suite of songs that run together much like Side B of Abbey Road, Timmy does promise that there’s a number of clues embedded into the music that one day may be spelled out more clearly. What form that will be though may very well depend on how the world is able to move forward in 2021. Whether it is as a long-form music video, a graphic novel, or even a live musical, Timmy is already beginning to plan more ways to expand on the tale told in this album using a number of possible different mediums.
In the meantime, he invites the listener to draw their own theories, but warns that they “may find bone-chilling parallels to real life events from things that they will encounter on…
…THE OTHER SIDE.”