It took David Giddings a few decades to make his first album.
That isn’t why he entitled the work Finding Time, but the suggestion is certainly there.
Described as an acoustic-based instrumentalist, this Willoughby musician gained positive traction with his launch; so positive, in fact, that he had to order more CDs.
“I had more interest than I’d anticipated,” he said of when the CD first came out last fall.
“I thought I’d sell a few copies to friends. I had 80 people attend a CD release party.”
He sold a quarter of his stock that night alone. The rest were gone within a few weeks. Having restarted his music career on the cusp of 60, he hadn’t anticipated this level of interest.
“Since I haven’t done this thing in a long time, I wasn’t all together,” he explained.
Going back, Giddings – like many – fell in love with music because of the Beatles. He was 12 and the Fab Four played at Toronto’s Maple Leaf Gardens.
“It was a life-changing moment for me,” he said.
From that point on, music was a guiding force for Giddings’.
“Music has been very important in my life,” he said. “It kept my head screwed on straight. It kept me away from drugs, alcohol, any other addictive issues because I was addicted to music.”
Together with others in the Vancouver music scene, in 1974 Giddings formed a folk rock band, Airborne. The band had a moderate level of success with the LP Songs for a City. But when he married his wife Colleen, Giddings knew music needed to go on hold so he could pursue a different career.
“I put my music away for a while, until I started going to church,” he explained.
The Langley man was active at church with the bass and guitar as a worship leader and parlayed that into the prompt to take guitar lessons and musical theory classes.
Then, when the kids left home, Giddings and his wife downsized and he built a sound-proof music room in their townhome.
“I started recording myself,” he said. “That was eight years ago.”
Now, with Finding Time, Giddings is rediscovering the passion he had in the late 1960s and early ’70s, when he said the music scene was “alive.”
The album’s 13 tracks (including two cover songs) might be described by some as chill music.
“I titled this album Finding Time, because it was really difficult finding time to put this together,” he said. “But it’s also about finding time to do something for yourself and to pursue the things you love.”