Running Out of Time was directly influenced by a Metallica music video. It tells the story of a man, injured and unable to move, sense or communicate with the outside world. We took that idea and swapped out the man, ours being a slightly more romantic type of person, trapped in his own mind. Phil created a pattern hitting on odd beats, using upstrokes and created a feeling of hesitancy in the faster parts and a melodic walk around in the verses, while I played around with finding the vocal tone and melody, ending up with one of the most sombre tracks we ever made. We added a bridge to provide a feeling of peace and tranquility for a moment before heading back out into the wind and rain of storming thoughts, and finished the song with our man finding acceptance, but not relief. When Phil got his cancer diagnosis this song took on a whole new meaning for us both. Even though we talked about it openly, there was still an ickiness that pushed it down the priority list. It slowly became a sort of taboo song that went pretty much ignored. When I decided to make this album I immediately knew two things, I would be including this song, and Phil's voice would be on it in whatever way it could be. I think of this song as the one on this record that's not only meant for him, but is also from him and, I'll be honest, it was hard to revisit this song that had become so apropos, but that's also the reason why I feel it had to be included. Production wise, the only hiccup was finding the right recordings to use for Phil's voice. My early ideas were to have his voice be an ethereal, muffled sounding thing, but I soon realized that I sometimes wanted to hear what he was saying. I went through hours of footage and phone recordings and found him saying some things that I thought helped tell the story well. The original song stayed pretty much the same, with Phil joining in by wandering around the room, chiming in here and there, adding his voice to the story. The last thing he says is "OK, I'm done." and was a filmed moment where we had just finished playing our last song of the night and he was heading home, and I thought it was a perfect way to end the song.more