Sotto James Counts the Trees on Are We Running Out Of Time?

Sotto James has spent the past year refining a particular kind of attention. The Athens songwriter, whose recent singles Cold Fingers and Talisman mapped held tension through a car image that refused to develop and a bright surface that concealed exhaustion, returns with Are We Running Out Of Time?. Written, performed and produced by Sotiris Georgakopoulos, mixed by Dimitris Kalamaras at Dudu Loft and mastered by Yiannis Christodoulatos at Sweetspot, the track was shaped with his father in mind. It does not emerge from one dramatic loss. It begins from the quieter recognition that a relationship once treated as permanent is subject to the same clock as everything else. Early on, a three-year-old version of him stood on a table with a wooden spoon for a microphone and sang for the family. His father put him onto Queen. The rest, as he has put it, wrote itself. That long line of inheritance now sits inside a song that asks how much of the shared present can still be held. In our conversation around Talisman, he spoke of contradictions as the momentum that pushes the work forward. Here the contradiction is simpler and sharper: the wish to stay fully present while already counting what is passing.

There is an old practical habit attached to certain European roads. Trees were sometimes planted at regular intervals so that a traveler could calculate distance simply by counting them as they passed. No map required, only a steady sequence and an eye that stayed open. On Are We Running Out Of Time? that habit is still present, but the arithmetic has changed. The trees are counted, the landscape moves past the window, and the number that accumulates is no longer a measure of how far the car has come. It is a measure of how much shared time remains while the motion continues. The bend ahead stays just out of reach. The next marker is always approaching. The count never quite finishes while the car is still moving.

The track opens in a state of exposed suspension. Warm synthetic layers and a measured mid-tempo pulse give the opening verses room to arrive without hurry. Sotto’s voice stays close at first, almost confiding, as the awareness appears as something sensed rather than seen. “Coming / It’s coming / It’s right around the bend,” he sings, the presence always approaching yet still just out of frame. “Dawning / Yawning / Drowsy little eye / Staring through the window / From a corner in the sky.” The arrangement does not follow a single path from quiet to loud. Intensity gathers around the voice, then withdraws into pockets of near-absence, then returns with greater force. Spacious reverb and layered keyboards keep a cinematic breadth while the pulse maintains a steady propulsive undercurrent. The effect keeps the central thought in motion, suppressed for a moment only to surface more urgently.

Against that expanding field the smallest details carry the weight. “Falling into crawling through the brevity we have… Trying not to think too much, counting trees as we pass them by / I will hold you closer to me, I just wish we had more time.” There is no grand farewell in the scene. Father and son are simply travelling together, watching the landscape move past the window. The emotional force comes from the intrusion of impermanence into an otherwise ordinary moment. The chorus question arrives with immediate melodic clarity, repeated and expanded by backing vocals and soft “Ooh” echoes that widen the space. Sotto’s voice moves naturally from the quieter, confiding register into more open, sustained lines. The question is not one he expects to answer. It is one he cannot put down.

The relationship grows more complicated when he sings, “Every time I see your face / I am staring back at mine.” Love and the awareness of time become inseparable. The song is therefore not only about the possibility of losing somebody else. It is also about understanding a life through the person who came before. In the final third the arrangement withdraws into its most fragile passage, then the fuller band returns in a surge that does not pretend time has been defeated. “I will hold you closer now / I will be there at your side” lands as a commitment to what can still be held rather than a promise to prevent what cannot. “Wait around, we’re in our prime / Let me have whatever’s mine.” The music then recedes into a wide, lingering outro. The sound itself appears to run out, leaving the title’s question suspended in the silence that follows.

With Are We Running Out Of Time? Sotto James captures the point at which loving somebody makes time audible. The trees keep passing. The window stays open. The count continues for as long as the car is moving. What remains is the decision to stay present while the arithmetic is still incomplete.