Moments, by definition, are fleeting. Like snowflakes in the palm of your hand, or unhealthy breakfast food brought into work on Friday morning.

But moments never really disappear… not when you have documentation. Not when you sit down and write a song about what you’re feeling right then and there. “Age of Gold” is just such a document, both in terms of what it says and how it came into being.

Stephen Frost explains in a recently posted YouTube clip that the song was composed and recorded in just 6 hours, providing an elegant snapshot of his feelings at the outset of an ill-fated relationship. In the video, he characterizes the moment in which “Age of Gold” was written as, “the right-before-things-got-wonderful phase of things, where I felt like anything could happen.” And the lyrics do an incredible job capturing the transitory nature of getting to know someone, by mentioning the weather, the season, and by memorializing individual utterances — “I like what you said about Antonin Artaud” and “I like what you said about le Marquis de Sade.”

Before hearing this song, I don’t know that I’d given much thought to how the words that people speak to us on a daily basis appear and disappear, irreversibly altering your future with those people, while at the same time drifting off into oblivion, never to be heard again. (Unless you’re under surveillance, in which case you’re better off lawyering up than musing philosophically on temporality.) It’s an incredible idea, and it reaffirms just how powerful music can be. We may not know everything that was said about Antonin Artaud, but a piece of that conversation will echo for all eternity, or at least until the robots enslave the human race and take away our mp3 privileges.

Since that could happen any day now, I suggest you go ahead and listen to “Age Of Gold” immediately, click here to snag it on Bandcamp, and join me in hoping that the time between now and when we hear another Stephen Frost track is as momentary as possible.

Stephen Frost — “Age Of Gold” [Bandcamp]