Rochester New York-based Jazz musician and singer/songwriter Annie Wells will be releasing a new album, Pictures of Heart, in early 2026. A live performer in venues large and small, Wells harks back to the Great American Songbook, Jazz, and singer/songwriter music, which she grew up listening to. As a result, she blends Jazz and Pop, as well as other genres that she loves, in her work.
With her “hybrid” style, Wells has shared the stage with artists as different as Jazz-Pop drummer Steve Gadd’s Gadd Gang and singer-songwriter Ani DiFranco. She often performs with Jazz musicians including Mike Kaupa, trumpeter, (Glenn Miller Orchestra, Joe Lock, Ray Charles) and Dave Arenius, who performs on the upright bass (Herb Ellis, Archie Shepp).
Today, we’re very pleased to premier Wells’ new single and video for “Time Escaped”, which arrives this Friday, November 14th, 2025, a track from Wells’ upcoming album, Pictures of Heart.
“Time Escaped” sets a wonderfully mellow and reflective mood in which quite intense emotions can come to light and find form, blending poignant images from the lyrics with emotive dialog between the instruments. We are introduced to a personified form of Time, a “she” who is to be criticized and the focus of complaint, since she is “cruel” and takes things away. We encounter an almost mythical image of a clock stopping and time escaping, as if the universe’s own clock has stopped and what we know as time has dashed away. Wells creates a fascinating drama through these images and they set the stage for the heart of the matter, which is the fallout for human beings of such disarray in the universe.
In this new track, we are introduced to the idea of a “you” the narrator is speaking to, those who she wishes to be with, but is separated from. The strangeness of the separation itself is expressed by the idea of being “through the looking glass”, like in Alice in Wonderland. The melancholy of this intense isolation gives way to a renewed determination that the narrator will be reunited with loved ones, that they will “make memories” again and right this essential wrong. Rather than remaining helpless, the song reasserts the meaningfulness of memories, of traditions, and of continuing to build relationships with those we care about.
Astonishingly, the intensity of all this subject matter is carried gracefully by the movements of the song, by the clear and determined vocals, by the mournful flugelhorn, and by the punctuating guitar. We should also give credit to Annie Wells’ lyric video, which is actually more than just a lyric video, since it has live footage of the songwriter working on music, looking at photographs, and considering the passage of time. Interspersed are sensitively posed scenes from nature, including seasonal changes, which, on the whole, add to the song by suggesting that time does move on and that we can hope for better times as a kind of natural process of change. While Time may have “escaped”, we get the sense that she will not permanently elude capture.
Wells says about her new track:
’Time Escaped’ is a love letter I wrote for my family during the pandemic. I finished writing the lyrics during a car trip from New York to North Carolina – the first visit with my parents and siblings after nearly 2 years of separation. As the miles passed beneath me, I imagined time as a sentient force, one that had held us apart. For so long, we could only glimpse each other “through the looking glass.”
On “Time Escaped”, Mike Kaupa plays the flugelhorn (Glenn Miller Orchestra, Dave Rivello, Joe Locke, Ray Charles), Dave Arenius plays the upright bass (Herb Ellis, Archie Shepp), Phil Marshall plays guitar (Colorblind James, La La Land) and Roy Marshall is on drums.
Soon to release new record Pictures of Heart, Wells has previously released five albums. As a through-line for her albums, we find “the twin themes of loss and hope.” We also find “strong, pivotal, and important women” as influences for Wells’ songwriting, like Edith Piaf, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Wells’ great-aunt Mary.
