Bill Scorzari’s Sidereal Days (Day 1) — “The metaphor is meant to signify that my return to the visions that I had for these songs when they were originally created, has been direct and preserved without regard or reference to other things, motions or perspectives that followed.”
Born in Queens, New York. Now based in Huntington, New York. Your passion for music began early, with both parents having strong singing voices. Your mom also played classical piano. Can you share a favorite memory from your childhood of your family singing together?
Well, we didn’t have formal sing-alongs or anything like that. It was more of, my mom and dad were just always singing. Whether it was in the house during the day doing chores or in the car with either the radio on or playing a handful of 8-Track tapes — we each had a favorite and we’d take turns on which one gets played next. They both had really great singing voices and my dad had this unique timing where he wouldn’t try to directly match the vocal of whatever song was playing, but would sing around it and make it his own in a really interesting and artful way.
My mom always had a song in mind that was relevant to whatever was happening at the time. You know, the lyrics would just fit whatever we were doing. They were usually songs from her time growing up that I’d never heard before but she also knew what was on the charts, or not. More so than my dad did. Mom was a real encyclopedia of music lyrics and she had such a beautiful, gentle and melodic singing voice. I have a couple of 45RPM records of her singing songs from the 1940s when she was in her 20s, that are really special to me.
Your parents gave you your first guitar at 8-years-old. You still own the ‘Classical’ nylon-string acoustic. How can parents best encourage their children to explore music to support their emotional, cognitive, and creative development?
Yes! I still have that guitar! That one was followed by a red 335-style electric guitar made by “Tempo,” and a “Marlboro” amplifier that was about a foot high. To me, it was the coolest thing ever. Music just drew me in from as far back as I can remember. There was a magic to it and I couldn’t get enough of it. I used to carry a cassette player around with me when playing with the other kids on the street in my neighborhood.
If you make music available, kids will naturally pick up on its magic, and they’ll almost always be curious to know how it’s done and want to try to make it happen themselves. Instruments are inherently magical that same way. They just draw you in. Realizing that you can influence the sound that comes from a drum for instance, by hitting it harder or softer, or at the edge or in the middle and all sorts of combinations of all of that, just naturally gets your mind going. You get that feeling that, “Hey, I’m doing this!” and it inspires you to experiment and figure out what else you can do with it. Cognitive and emotional engagement just happens on its own when the challenge of something is fun. Creativity naturally flows from that.
The first couple of bands that I was in when I was a kid, rehearsed in the basement of my mom and dad’s house for hours and hours. My mom would flip the light switch at the top of the stairs a few times when we got too loud — that was our cue to turn down! My parents really did put up with a lot, and I am so grateful to have had that kind of support. So, really, if you can just get any instrument into a kid’s hands, either at home or through outreach or school programs, and let them experiment and learn with it, you are giving them an immeasurable gift that will last a lifetime.
Your older cousin, who played in a ’60s rock band, gave you records and cassettes to listen to and figure out, on your own, how to recreate the music. How did learning to ‘play by ear’ inspire you as a musician?
That was such a big influence on me at a really young age. I think I was like 8 or 10 years old when I started watching them rehearse. So they were 18, or in their early 20s. Giants! My experience was that there was something really cool happening right in front of me and I felt like I was a part of it. It felt essential.
My Uncle, who made a living driving a Checkered Cab in New York City (with the fold down “Jump Seats” in the back and a coin-changer attached to his belt), had built out the basement of my cousin’s house in Flushing, Queens, like a live-music venue. It had a bar, complete with a sink and taps, with restaurant-type booths and tables all along one wall, and I was right there in it, within arms reach of a Hammond B3 and Leslie, bass and guitar amps, drums, microphone stands, PA speakers, cables, lights, my cousin and all of the guys in the band being as cool as cool can be (think late 1960s / early 70s attitude, bell-bottom jeans and all).
And, the music that they were playing from that time was incredible — The Doors, Three Dog Night, Procol Harum, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Young Rascals, Free, Deep Purple… It was rock-band loud, and it was really exciting to be there. So, of course, I wanted to do what they were doing. But when I set out to try, and started taking formal music lessons centered on sight-reading rudimentary melodies from a primer book, it was clear that that was just not going to work. I had heard and seen too much more. My only option as I saw it, was to try to figure out how to play what I was hearing on the cassettes and records that my cousin had given to me. That’s what I wanted to do and somehow I figured out how to do it pretty quickly.
I don’t really think too much about the pros and cons of it now. In later years I did learn some music theory and did get pretty good at sight reading a bunch of classical guitar pieces too, but I’d have to spend some time with it to remember how to do that again now, and playing and writing by ear still just feels more natural to me. Those memories from my pre-teen years and the songs that I learned how to play, concretized the foundation of my sense of what music is and how it’s played. They gave me an internal, intuitive compass from just seeing, hearing, feeling and then playing, rather than from looking at black dots and lines on a white page, and I’m thankful that my music will always be influenced by them.
I’m also really thankful that you asked this question, because thinking back on it all now, I realize that I wasn’t just being introduced to great music from the 60s and 70s at my cousin’s band rehearsals. I was also learning how they were learning those songs. I saw how they were figuring out the bass, drum, organ, guitar, lead vocal and harmony parts, and how they kept replaying them and going over them until they got them all right. I was learning how to learn, by watching how they were learning. And they were learning by doing. And I saw that as the way that it gets done. And that’s what I also wanted to do.
Formed your own band with some of the older kids in the neighborhood, which in turn led you to playing your first club gig at the age of 13. Can you share how it felt to play a club gig at such a young age?
It was amazing! So much fun! Playing in a band on a formal stage was something that I had always wanted to do, and to have the chance to do it at that age was incredible. I knew right away that I wanted to do it again. Sharing songs with an audience is sharing time with friends. It still feels the same.
Your dad, a preeminent New York Trial Attorney, and the Dean of his law school alma mater completed a ‘mock’ application for your ‘immediate enrollment’ in Law School on the day you were born.
Fifteen years ago, you experienced ‘that moment’ when ‘everything changed’ — you heard a recording of Justin Townes Earle performing “Mama’s Eyes.” It inspired you to begin writing songs again and, in turn, rediscovering yourself as an artist. The passing of your dad a short time later led you to wrap up your own law career and become a full-time musician. Are there experiences from your life before music that continue to impact your songwriting?
Oh, yeah. Everything that’s happened in my life, in the lives of people I know or knew, or in the lives of strangers, anything I’ve lived through or felt others living through in a way that confirmed or confronted my own experiences — I’m drawing from all of that, consciously or not, when I’m writing a lyric or a storyline. I don’t think I could stop their influence even if I wanted to. I mean, I wouldn’t know where else to look for a source beyond that.
There were aspects of my law career which were predestined as you mention, but following through with it when the time came was a matter of choice as well, and it was all me then. And all of that can also be said for the parallel path of my music career. As it turns out, both paths supported each other at different points in time and eventually I managed to merge them both into one.
My previous experiences performing on music stages gave me early confidence in the courtroom that I might otherwise have had to develop from scratch there. And working as an attorney later benefited my music career. I learned a lot about verbal and non-verbal communication, and developed an acute appreciation and love for language. I became a student of precision in the usage and meaning of words and their capacity for conveying thought and emotion with accuracy. How you look, how and when you sit or stand or gesture, what you say and how you say it, your rhythm, your tone, your cadence — it’s important to be aware of all of these things when you’re asking people in a courtroom to focus their attention on you and hear what you’re saying, and you need to be able to adjust them as circumstances change from one moment to the next if you want them to keep listening.
To quote a lyric from my song “It All Matters” from my 2019 Now I’m Free album, “It’s everything that’s gone before that keeps you going on your way.” And everything that I learned there has since come to serve as an essential resource for both my lyric writing and my live-music performances.
Hearing that JTE song was a game changer for me. It was a stunning masterclass of what songwriting can be and it immediately captured my full attention as something to strive for in my own writing. My present best measure for whether I’ve delivered something worthwhile for the folks who listen to my music and come to see and hear me perform, is whether I’ve done all that I can do to engage with them honestly, in ways that will create a genuine connection and a meaningful experience for them and for me. I’ve found that the best way for me to do that, is to first connect with what I’m thinking and feeling, try to define it with music and lyrics as clearly as I can, and then deliver it in a recorded or live performance as best as I can in that moment. When I share it and it has meaning for someone else too, there’s really nothing more that I could ask for. That was the driving force behind the recording sessions for the two new Sidereal Days albums, and for the 4 albums before them, and it’s what keeps me excited about writing new songs for the next one.
Releasing two albums, the 10-track Sidereal Days (Day 1) on October 17, 2025, and the 11-track Sidereal Days (Day 2) on September 25, 2026. There will also be three official music videos filmed in Nashville and Kentucky, five in-studio music videos, and multiple ‘behind the scenes’ documentary videos filmed during the Nashville recording sessions. A sidereal day is the time it takes for the Earth to complete one full rotation relative to the stars, rather than the Sun. How does this astronomical concept serve as a metaphor for the themes explored in the albums?
Songs, more than anything, are like time capsules. You hear them and they bring back memories and emotions that you had when you first heard them. When they are songs that you’ve written, they are also a personal reminder of what caused you to write them in the first place. Over the years, I accumulated a good number of songs that I hadn’t gotten around to recording yet, and I started to feel that I’d never get to the earlier ones, and that they’d be lost to time, if I just kept recording only my newest songs.
Most of the Sidereal Days songs were written years, and some even decades ago, and my aim in recording them now was to be as true as possible to the original vision I had for them in the past, while recreating and recording them in and for the present, and preserving them as an archive for the future. I believe that these two albums do that. The metaphor is meant to signify that my return to the visions that I had for these songs when they were originally created, has been direct and preserved without regard or reference to other things, motions or perspectives that followed.
I wanted the official videos and the videos filmed during the Nashville recording sessions to help tell those original stories of these songs and to also provide a look into the present creation of these two albums. Having accomplished that, we’ll keep sharing them all on the upcoming release dates this year and next, while also getting ready to welcome in the new solar days that are set to follow past that point.
You’ve noted that this album contains songs you wrote a long time ago. What was it like revisiting and recording these older songs now, and how do you feel your perspective on them has changed over time?
For many of these songs, I think that waiting this long to record them actually helped me stay true to their original purpose in the sense that, you hope to grow as an artist as time goes on, and sometimes you have an idea for a song, but you don’t feel that your delivery is living up to the vision that you have for it. So, you set it aside until you feel confident that you’ve gotten to the point where you can deliver that vision genuinely and with honest emotion that will connect and resonate first with you and then also with your audience. I felt that way with many of these songs and it’s part of how I picked which ones I wanted to record for these two albums, from among other songs that I still haven’t yet recorded. I did revise some of the lyrics in one or two of them, to better tell their stories and help bring their original vision to light.
But inevitably, as time goes on, some aspects of the stories are going to be fluid and will be subjectively interpreted from a new perspective or in a different light. That’s especially so with live performances. Something that someone said to me yesterday can affect the meaning that a lyric takes on as I’m singing it today. And, in that same moment, someone in the audience is getting an altogether different meaning from that same lyric, because of how it resonates with their own life experiences. And maybe tomorrow something will happen in their life that changes the meaning yet again. I love that songs live and breathe with a life of their own that way. With any luck, they’ll last through a lifetime of varied meanings.
These songs still hold their original meanings for me and they always will, but revisiting them was multifaceted because some have also taken on more. When I was listening through them, I chose the songs that I felt were carrying stories, themes and emotions that were still valid and still resonated with me, and my intent was to capture the original vision that I had for them when I first wrote them, on these two albums. So — that perspective — that’s what I returned to, and that’s where I stayed when I recorded them. One way that my perspective has changed in general is that, the comfort and clarity that these songs might bring to the lives of the folks who can now listen to them, now that we’ve gotten them recorded, is more important to me than what they might, at this point in time, bring to me. Now that all of the recording is done, I’m happy to let time take them where it may from here.That was my intent from the start.
Is there a particular lyric or song on Sidereal Days (Day 1) that encapsulates the heart of the album for you?
Well, I think the answer to that is, no. We have been and are still releasing some of the songs as singles before releasing the full albums, but there’s so much diversity in the style, production, instrumentation, arrangement, and even genre in some instances with these 21 songs that, I don’t think there’s any one of them that can be said to be representative of all of the others. The Sidereal Days albums are like a storybook with 21 chapters. You get a better understanding of the book after you’ve read all of the chapters. You have to remember that I grew up with the “album” format being an artform all its own, and as these songs were chosen with that artform in mind, they all take on a broader and more impactful meaning when you hear them played together, in the context and sequence of both albums. That’s when you’ll start to notice the connections that run through the songs, and how each one adds a missing piece to the others. That’s how you get to the heart of it. You won’t pick up on that if you just listen to one song or a handful of singles separate from the rest.
You described “Grace” as possibly your favorite track on the Day 1 album. “…I was able to enter into a fully unguarded frame of mind and give everything to my performance in the studio. I’ve always felt that’s the most important thing to try to do when recording a song, because the performance that makes its way onto the final recording is the one that will tell the story every time it’s played. I also took my time when writing this song, which I had started nearly ten years ago and have only now gotten ready to share.” What is the backstory of the song?
Well, one of the reasons I said that about “Grace” is that the concept that I had for the song seemed like such a precarious deep dive into difficult emotions, that the vision of hope, clarity and release that I saw as being its mission, seemed almost unattainable. And, that was part of the reason why it took me nearly a decade to attempt the focus that I needed, to be able to perform and record my acoustic guitar and vocal part the way that I was envisioning them to be. I saw the vocal as the most important element. It had to carry the story and hold its focus through the entire length of the song, without dropping it, for the song to work at all.
After finally feeling good about it at last, the next step was to ask everyone at the recording studio in Nashville to also take that deep dive with me, also carry that focus from beginning to end, and to just be nothing less than profoundly beautiful for all 7 minutes and 14 seconds of it. That’s not too much to ask, is it? I didn’t think so, because the performers that you hear on these albums have recorded four albums of my music with me, over the past ten years for some, and I truly believe that there were none better for the task. They are all true masters of their instruments and voices, and in an instant, each one fully understood and embraced the song and perfectly captured its essence with sublime artistry. For me, it was an absolute triumph of nearly a decade of time and patience, followed by complete unity of vision and real art. With celebratory high-fives, joyful laughter and even tears flowing as we listened back to it in the studio, I could not want for more.
As for the backstory of “Grace,” a lot of my songs are written as a culmination of many different experiences from which I’ve attempted to derive meaning and clarity of purpose for myself and for others who might also be seeking such things. I can piece together what the story of the song is for me, and even what it is for some others as well, but I prefer to let “Grace” just happen and be whatever it needs to be for someone new who listens to it, without me saying something that might get in the way of that.
Previous album releases (Just The Same, Through These Waves, Now I’m Free, and The Crosswinds of Kansas) have been deeply personal and focused on topics like loss, self-discovery, and the human condition. How does Sidereal Days (Day 1) fit into your existing body of work, and does it represent a new chapter or a continuation of past themes?
It’s all of that. It’s an expansion on the themes from those previous albums, an addition to them as another chapter all its own, and also a turning point. I mean, they’ve all been that, and the two Sidereal Days albums are also that, as well as a continual turning of pages and a huge leap forward on the quest for growth and understanding.
Beyond the second part of the album, what’s next for you? Are you already working on new material, or are you focused on promoting this project?
It’s both. The Sidereal Days albums span and embody an enormous amount of time and effort. There was the initial writing of 21 songs starting as early as in 1994 for at least one of them, nearly three years of recording from 2022 through mastering in 2025, everything else in between and everything that’s coming up since then and will have to happen through to the final release date of the (Day 2) album on September 25 of next year. I am so thankful for everyone who has been a part of making these albums and I am grateful for everyone who is now supporting their release as well. Finally getting these songs recorded, and now already starting to release them out into the world, frees me up from needing to look back into the past to do that, and, that’s where the “turning of pages” aspect of the Sidereal Days albums comes in.
It’s great to finally have most of the heavy lifting already done and I’ve been slowly redirecting more of my focus onto writing new songs and look forward to being able to do more of that in the days ahead. In fact, I just recently recorded the vocal and acoustic guitar tracks for the first new song that I wrote just a few weeks ago, and it feels so good to be writing and recording again! We are also working on the finishing touches for the Sidereal Days (Day 2) album-art, and a bunch of other things that also need to be done to get it cued up for release next year. The songs on the (Day 2) album are such an integral part of the story that begins with the release of the (Day 1) album on October 17th, and I can’t wait to finally share it all!