All My Time

"You cannot plan anything. You can't expect anything good or bad. Everything is just going to continue to be however it will be."

This is the way musician Rae Chen encapsulates his debut album as tofusmell, All My Time.

At times reserved and gracefully restrained, and other times overflowing and agitated, All My Time showcases Rae's signature precision in vulnerable, clear-eyed songwriting, with a larger, lusher, and more fleshed-out scale of production than we've seen from him before. Here, Chen poetically distils the uncomfortable complications of learning to release expectation from outcome, and in turn live contentedly in life's constant, confusing uncertainty. It's not necessarily an apathetic resignation strung through the songs of All My Time, but rather a hopeful insistence that impermanence, and the toiling mystery it brings, is its own kind of steady salve.

For fans of Leith Ross, Searows, Big Thief, Phoebe Bridgers, Boygenius, Elliot Smith, Sufjan Stevens, Nick Drake.