New York-based singer-songwriter, recording artist, and performer Bill Scorzari returns with his 5th and 6th albums, Sidereal Days (Day 1) & (Day 2). The first to be released in this upcoming double album is Sidereal Days (Day 1) on October 17, 2025. Sidereal Days (Day 2) will be released in 2026. The musicianship on these albums is full of graceful nuance, cinematic moments, and deeply personal narratives.
“Bill Scorzari transcends titles like songwriter or poet,” wrote Pat Moran in Acoustic Guitar. “He catapults past categories into a dark, ruminative, and ultimately life-affirming realm where family folklore, memories, pain, prayer, and incantation meet.”
Scorzari places an emphasis on lyrics and musical nuance, a “writer’s writer,” as some would say. “To be sure, one needs solitude to appreciate his literate craft, a blend of prose and poetry put to music, a Walt Whitman of sorts for our times,” wrote Jim Hynes in Glide Magazine.
He’s been compared, in parts, with Sam Baker, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, Leonard Cohen, Townes Van Zandt, and even Chris Stapleton. What distinguishes Scorzari as he examines the human condition is his distinctive voice, which can be subtle and striking at the same time.
The ten tracks on Sidereal Days (Day 1) are wide-ranging and profoundly heartfelt. There are songs of love and regret; songs that came to him quickly and others that took years to complete; songs with multiple layers and others that are short and sublime—balancing the radio-ready with long and contemplative. Scorzari's music is sensitive to the level of clarity he seeks for himself, and his arrangements are strong and poignant.
The band for Sidereal Days (Day 1) is Bill Scorzari on lead and harmony vocals, acoustic, classical, baritone, tenor, and electric guitars, and piano; Brad Talley on Dobro; Chelsea McGough on cello; Cindy Richardson Walker and Marie Lewey (aka The Shoals Sisters) on backing vocals; Danny Mitchell [Miranda Lambert] on piano and Hammond B3 organ; Eamon McLoughlin (the Ryman staff fiddler) on violin/fiddle; Joshua Britt on mandolin; Juan Solorzano on electric, rhythm, and 2nd acoustic guitars, pedal steel, and ganjo; Megan McCormick on harmony vocal; Michael Rinne [Miranda Lambert] on upright acoustic, electric, and hollow body electric bass; and Neilson Hubbard on drums and percussion.
Bill self-recorded his instrumentation and vocals for the entire double album at his Huntington, New York studio, First Thunder Recording. It was there that, starting in July of 2022, Bill laid out all of his parts and fine-tuned his compositions over two years’ time before bringing those recordings to Skinny Elephant Recording in Nashville in August 2024 to continue with engineer Dylan Alldredge, with Bill and Neilson Hubbard co-producing. The final mixes were completed by engineer Nic Coolidge at Dead Pop Studios in Providence, RI, in early 2025, and engineer Hallie Melton completed the mastering in April 2025 in Nashville.
Sidereal Days (Day 1) opens with the romantic ballad “All This Time,” featuring Bill’s classical nylon-stringed guitar and vocals accompanied by a melodic 2nd acoustic guitar, haunting pedal steel swells, tender piano, cinematic percussion, and a symphonic string section including cello, violin, and upright acoustic bass.
“And Carries Me Away” is filled with poetry and prose, elegantly enhanced by the nuances within the musical performance—the drone notes of the pedal steel, the symphonic swells of the violin and cello, and the piano and acoustic guitar parts interacting in counterpoint to each other, culminating in drumming that emulates a steam train at the end—finally taking this song to where it has always been wanting to go for years.
“And So (Deep Into the Dark)” is a soulful, hard-hitting breakup song with multiple instrumental and vocal layers that build in intensity as the song progresses, resulting in a powerful and moving arrangement. Describing a relationship where each person’s prideful reactivity has an escalating causal effect upon the others’, all inevitably leading to its unfortunate ending (deep into the dark) in the chorus.
In “Borrowed Hearts,” Bill says, “My aim was to get the syncopated picking of the two acoustic guitars and the ringing and cascading sounds of the zen bells and Zephyr chimes to suggest shimmering sunlight, ripples, and stones skipping on water. Adding the drums, percussion, acoustic bass, piano, and backing vocals helped to further define that atmosphere.”
“Can't Break This Fall” is a radio-ready, up-tempo, hook-driven, “uh oh, I’ve fallen in love” song with a clean, catchy electric guitar riffing throughout in a major key.
Bill wrote the original version of “Did We Tie” decades ago but wasn’t releasing music back then. A few years ago, he was going through some old storage boxes and found a cassette tape copy of the recording and decided to give it a listen. He had always liked the melody and chord changes, but the old arrangement and recording were unavoidably dated. After listening to it a few times more, the song stayed with him. The result is a beautifully haunting arrangement with many textures and layers.
“Endgame” has a conversational pace and cadence to its lyrics, which is something that Bill often strives for, demonstrating his use of complex word patterns. There’s also a lot of thematic content in the lyrics, including persistence, the trials that it will put you through, the revelatory awareness that you might acquire from it, and transcendence.
It’s fairly well known that Bill doesn’t write many songs that are under 4 minutes or more in length. But occasionally, he does, and his country song “From Your Heart” is one of them. At just around 2 minutes and 20 seconds or so, it might be a “record” for his shortest song. As “short and simply sweet” as it is, however, there are no less than 10 musicians playing or singing on it.
“Grace” is a melancholy, love-lost opus with vivid, narrative-based lead vocals and lyrics in a part-sung, part-spoken-word format. Bill says, “There’s not nearly enough room to tell the full story of this song here. Suffice to say, it starts many years ago with a bridge hanging by wires across a stream, a friend, the ending of a relationship, heartbreak, and Grace. The lyrics are so important. It took me years to finish writing them. I needed them to be the conversation that needed to happen, but that couldn’t happen, and to make that conversation happen in this song. My intent in doing that was to make it accessible to anyone who needed to have that conversation but couldn’t so that they could in this song.”
“Breathe” is an uplifting song in which the focus is handed back and forth between the instruments and vocals throughout, making the song itself “breathe” along the way. Bill says, “Many years ago, after I performed it live at the end of my set at a concert arranged in part by John Platt of WFUV, John referred to it as a ‘benediction.’ And that is truly the spirit I intended for it when I wrote it. It’s another song that’s been waiting for the right album to come along and give it a home where it could directly spread some positivity around.”
“As far as the title, ‘Sidereal Days,’ I liked the concept of a pure descriptor of the moment when something returns to where it had previously been, without consideration of how it was otherwise moving,” says Bill. “It seemed fitting for these two albums, which contain many earlier written songs that I chose to revisit and record at this time.”
There are some common threads that weave through certain tracks of this two-album release in various ways. For example, the chorus lyric of “Did We Tie” that refers to “etching it in stone” has a counterpart in a verse lyric in “Grace” that says, “… nothing’s forever etched in stone…”
“So, I guess it’s true that you never do really ‘finish’ writing a song,” Bill asserts. “Ultimately, it seems, any ‘unfinished’ parts will find their way into other songs and continue on there in a new context, under another title, before perhaps moving on further from there.”
