‘Spokane is just hungry for good artists,’ and band Timeworm is ready to dish out tunes

Local band Timeworm has been keeping a heavy foot on the music-making gas for quite some time. Now the band is on the cusp of releasing its debut album.

Longtime drummer and singer J. I. Gassen found the post-COVID urge to get involved with the Lilac City’s music scene. He decided to attend an open-mic “funk jam” hosted by Lucas Brown at the Red Room Lounge, where he also met another first-timer, guitarist Indy Heyer.

The two, who were looking to start up a project, immediately hit it off.

“Right from the beginning, we were just cranking songs out and we knew we had something special and interesting,” Gassen said.

The search for a bassist didn’t take long. While working at the Grain Shed, Gassen met multi-instrumentalist John Wayne Williams, who was playing an acoustic guitar set. During a conversation, Williams mentioned he also plays the bass guitar, and Gassen couldn’t help but invite him to fill the last piece of the young Timeworm puzzle.

Although chemistry is an issue to be worked out for some new bands, this was far from the case for Timeworm. Instead, its primary issues stemmed from “figuring out what Timeworm was,” because the three have been intentional about not being boxed in by any genre or notions of what the band “should” sound like.

“Whatever ideas we like, and whatever ideas flow out of us, that’s what Timeworm will be,” Gassen said.

This resulted in Timeworm’s intriguing mixture of psychedelia, funk, indie and pop. Its sound may be somewhat difficult to define, but with originality being the goal, this is how the band likes it.

On the lyrical side of things, Gassen tends to find inspiration in the world around him and uses these fascinations as metaphors and analogies to convey more complex, deeper emotions than what lies just beneath the surface.

A recent example of this is the band’s latest single, “Ponderosa,” which was released Tuesday. The song stems from the hundreds of years a ponderosa pine can live while remaining rooted in a single location.

“I just think that being in one place, connecting with the underground and the plants and trees and flowers and birds and squirrels and everything around you would be a really interesting experience that we don’t have access to,” Gassen said. “They’re beings just like us, but have a different scale of life and time.”

The song is Timeworm’s fourth single preceding their debut full-length record, “Interplanetary Flamingo Park Reunion,” set to be released on May 20.

“The album is the culmination of a year of recording and mixing and play and experimentation,” Gassen said.

The band concentrated on making the 11-track album an “experience” for the listener as it ebbs and flows between song to song and features an array of sounds, tempos, atmospheres and emotions.

“We think we’re putting our best foot forward and we can’t wait for everyone to hear that,” Gassen said.

Timeworm fans have no reason to fear a lack of music from the emerging local staple. The band is “always writing” and is working on the concepts of a second, third, even fourth album.

But before all of that, Timeworm will add another performance to their already long list when they play the Hamilton Studio Listening Room on Saturday.

The two-hour set will feature the band’s well-known tunes as well as many songs the public has never heard before – along with a few covers accented by the band’s signature twists.

And with yet another local show, the highly consistent group continues to embed itself in the city’s highly welcoming music scene.

“We’ve found pretty quickly that you can be a big fish in a small pond here, in the best way, because Spokane is just hungry for good artists,” Gassen said.