All Kinds of Time

As a songwriter, I tend to pay attention to songs with unusual set-ups, story lines, or lyrics. One example I've had stuck in my head the last few days is a song by Fountains of Wayne called "All Kinds of Time," from their excellent 2003 album Welcome Interstate Managers. I like FoW in general - their songs often have unusual points of view and humorous lyrics, as typified by their best known song, the tongue-in-cheek boy's fantasy "Stacy's Mom" (funny video).

Although I'm not especially a sports fan, I've often heard the phrase "all kinds of time" in sports contexts as a slangish way of saying "plenty of time." Here's the lyric (by Adam Schlesinger and Chris Collingwood):

The clock's running down
The team's losing ground
To the opposing defense
The young quarterback
Waits for the snap
When suddenly it all starts to make sense

He's got all kinds of time
He's got all kinds of time
All kinds of time
He's got all kinds of time
All kinds of time

He takes a step back
He's under attack
But he knows that no one can touch him now
He seems so at ease
A strange inner peace
Is all that he's feeling somehow

He's got all kinds of time
He's got all kinds of time
All kinds of time
He's got all kinds of time
All kinds of time

[Bridge]
He thinks of his mother
He thinks of his bride-to-be
He thinks of his father
His two younger brothers
Gathered around the widescreen TV

He looks to the left
He looks to the right
And there in a golden ray of light
Is his open man
Just as he planned
The whole world is his tonight

What I like is that it's an entire song about a single moment, a few seconds at most, describing the point of view of the quarterback whose sense of time flow is slowed down. I guess you'd say he's "in the zone" and entirely focused on completing the play that he has set up.

There's no FoW video for this song AFAIK, but not surprisingly, there is an NFL promotional video based on it (I found it on the media page of FoW's web site). It's not the whole song but it's still pretty cool.