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 distills 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. 

Following the release of his 2023 EP Humor, Chen spent a few months intermittently touring with Leith Ross before making the daring decision to move away from his home state of Florida to Winnipeg, Canada. Once there, he finished writing the songs that would come to make up All My Time, and began recording. While Chen has primarily worked solo in the past – writing, producing, and recording his music himself – he brought in a collection of new collaborators to help build the songs of All My Time. Six of the songs were co-produced and recorded with Keiran Placatka in Winnipeg, and then developed throughout the months following Chen’s move. New friends, Chen found the production process with Placatka to be surprisingly intuitive and creatively inspiring. For the two of them, it wasn’t just the instrumental arrangements that felt important to the songmaking, but also the emotional atmosphere those arrangements conjured. This inclination is evident on album standout “Pilot Fish” – Chen’s hushed vocals and shuffling guitar interplay seamlessly with swirling electronic chimes and warm, ambling base, swelling and receding like a gentle tide.

Interspersed with Placatka’s contributions are four songs produced and recorded with Paul Larson in Los Angeles, each one with an energetic and dynamic live-band sound inspired by folk-rock of the early aughts. Tracks like “Voice Cracks” and “Force the Sun West!” incorporate reeling, fuzzed electric guitar and punchy drums bolstered by darker-toned production. Having only ever recorded in the confines of his bedroom, Chen took advantage of this new opportunity of working in studio spaces to showcase the breadth of his range and musical interests. While it required him to relinquish some amount of creative control – an unfamiliar practice – it was well worth the leap. 

The collection is rounded out with “Luck”, produced by Chen himself, and “Overspender”, produced with Jack Hallenbeck in Los Angeles and reminiscent of the whisper-close folk stylings of Sufjan Stevens and Nick Drake that Chen has become well known for. Despite the myriad hands involved in the overall production, All My Time remains cohesive, held together with Chen’s earnest and enveloping story-telling. 

Recurring through All My Time is a zen-like admittance of the inconsequentiality of one's small place in the world, paired with an involuntary desire to still seize control of times uncontrollable will, yearning for a path that must surely be better than the present one. On “(Me Tomorrow)” we hear Chen tell himself “The sky is bending around you/you’re nothing”, a declaration he returns to on “Walk Me Back To Nothing” with the aching verse “I am the leaves damp/I am the rain falling/I am nothing/I am just misunderstanding.” The songs across All My Time find Chen in constant search of safety, contentment, and reassurance that he never quite grasps. When Chen sighs out “I hate not ever knowing” on “Rock Collector”, there’s a weariness that weighs the words down. He’s both too young, and too old. Time moves both too slow, and too fast. But rather than incongruous, these dueling laments reveal a sharp truth about what it means to be young and alive. There is no use in waiting to arrive at a moment of pure and perfect growth: the arrival is in the journey itself. The going and going and going becomes a different kind of revelatory answer. And it’s with this reassurance that we leave All My Time, Chen’s steady-handed and confident collection of musical prose, executed with immense beauty, craft, and care. 

Tasha Viets-VanLear