"It's all about storytelling," Charleston explains, and then quotes Diane Sawyer – her former boss at PrimeTime Live. “When we were in the thick of scripting, and we couldn’t see the forest for the trees, she used to say ‘remember – just tell the story.' " And for Charleston, a self described ‘language junkie’ those were words to live by; “whether it’s journalism, or lyric poetry, the world of words is so full of possibility – the possibility of creating some fresh, new evocative meaning or metaphor – that is what interests and excites me when I’m writing a new song.”  In Charleston's particular case, Sawyer’s mandate rates with the direction from a Count Basie or Gil Evans.  "Sound is not unimportant to me;" Charleston says "I love playing with the guys in my band. Making music together is a joyful experience. But for me, that alone, without storytelling to back it up, is incomplete."  

She mentions the title song of the collection, written by the English folk singer Sandy Denny and popularized in the '60s by Judy Collins.  "I've been singing that song in my head for years, searching for a specific arrangement.  I wanted the feeling of the suspension of time through the sound itself, which I think I finally achieved here with my wonderful musical director Dave Stryker.  So that's how you set the table: You begin with the meaning of the lyrics – then, develop the sound around them – and when you integrate the two, they will carry even more weight.  Because when you've got the right musical space, the words have room to resonate."  

"These songs all, in one way or another, reflect some aspect of our collective relationship with time," says Charleston, a life-long admirer of that epic wrestling with and caressing of calendar movement, Proust's Remembrance of Things Past.  “Whether it’s a cherished memory of a specific person, place or thing -- past, present or future – I hope to spark people’s subconscious emotions, and in doing so, remind them of just how precious time is.”

Along with hints of folk music and Charleston’s own compositions such as "Song for the Ages," written for the night President Obama accepted the U.S. Presidency at Grant Park, selections range from Stevie Wonder's soulful "Overjoyed" and Percy Mayfield's "Please Send Me Someone to Love," to reworkings of Brazilian treasures  "Wave" by Antonio Carlos Jobim and Milton Nascimento's “Tudo Que VocêPodia Ser/Everything You Were Meant to Be," (with English lyrics by Charleston), to reinterpretations of great American standards, "I Hear Music" and "This Nearly Was Mine."   

All are delivered with Charleston's luminous rhythmic flexibility and immediate timbral richness -- a remarkable instrument that she has sought to refine instead of indulge.  Whether linking the yearnings of "Please Send Me Someone to Love" with increasing erotic anxiety, exulting in the personal pleasure of "Overjoyed," dancing through "Everything You Were Meant to Be," or demonstrating a seeming defiance of a force as strong as gravity on her original "Dance of Time," Charleston sings with full engagement and zero pretense, wasting no words.   No better example of this appears on the album than Charleston’s climactic performance of her "Song for the Ages," where she attempts a social anthem and, delivering its perfectly coalesced melody with the persuasive intimacy of a love song, reaches her ambitious goal.   

She grew up in Chicago's Hyde Park, the only daughter of a jazz enthusiast and a mother who sang and taught voice.   Music was everywhere in her house.  She tells the story." My dad was an English professor.  He used to put T.S. Eliot in my cereal bowl in the morning to talk about later. He played jazz piano and had jazz radio on all the time. Count Basie, Duke Ellington, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, and Ella Fitzgerald recordings played pretty much 24/7 in our house."   

For many singers and songwriters, a background remains exactly that: a background.  Its particular events and experiences may exert great power on choices, sensibilities, and manners.  Yet often they remain indirect, essentially private influences. Not so with Charleston. When she was six, her father took Charleston and her brother to hear Duke Ellington at the University of Chicago's Rockefeller Chapel.  She tells the story.  “We waited and waited for him to arrive.  It was raining when he and the band finally got out of the tour bus -- and they were all wearing shower caps to protect their well coiffed hair!  They had to carry their own instruments, and so, couldn’t hold umbrellas as well.  Just imagine -- all these elegant gentlemen wearing these crazy ladies’ shower caps!  My dad introduced us, and as we shook his hand, I remember him looking down at me, with his beautifully lined face, kind eyes and deep, mellifluous voice. He said, 'Hello Miss Rondi, it’s very nice to meet you.' I remember being so excited I got goose bumps and a big lump in my throat."

Music, Charleston points out, is deep in her genes.  "Everybody in my family sings," she says.  "In addition to my father, brother and mother, who was a professional singer, my grandmother and her six sisters all sang.  On the new album, I wrote a song called “Your Spirit Lingers,” which was inspired by a book written by my great-grandmother Indiana about her life, basically, as a pioneer woman. She traveled by covered wagon across the country at six months of age, grew up on the prairie, lived through unspeakable hardship, and ended up in Oregon.  But even though she had no formal education, she was incredibly musical, and was an exceptionally gifted writer," Charleston says of Indiana, who eventually chronicled her experiences in exceptionally strong and vivid, self-taught prose, a bound copy of which Charleston inherited and treasures.  “I often wonder, if she had been born in a different time, what she could have accomplished.” Charleston seems to channel Indiana's struggle throughout "Your Spirit Lingers," with her lyric, "Maybe she’s the poet you were always meant to be; your spirit lingers; it lives inside of me; this hunger, this yearning sails on...." Yet, she continues," at home in Hyde Park though, it would be my mother out in the front room singing John Cage and teaching voice and my dad in the kitchen or in his office grading papers and listening to jazz” that would impact her musical evolution.  

Before attending Juilliard, Charleston devoured recordings with her brother, now a percussionist who plays regularly with the New York Philharmonic.  They   loved the Beatles, Beethoven and Brubeck – as well as Stevie Wonder, and especially Joni Mitchell.  For Charleston, performing music is as natural as talking, and talking frequently takes the form of storytelling.  That ancient instinct provides the foundation of the warm lucidity of her extraordinary work on Who Knows Where the Time Goes, the successor to Charleston's critically acclaimed 2008 collection In My Life.  

A couple of key times after she left Chicago, Charleston seemed to move away from music.  After acting in her teens in the University of Chicago productions of Eliot's “Murder in the Cathedral,” Oscar Wilde's “The Importance of Being Earnest,” and other plays, she auditioned successfully for the famous Shakespearean, John Houseman, and initially enrolled in Juilliard’s theater department.  Yet after a few semesters she transferred to music -- “Where I'd always wanted to be," she says -- and was accepted to the opera program.  After completing two degrees, Charleston sang professionally for a while.  "I'm petite – ‘vertically challenged’ at 5'3"," she says, "and I sang a lot of Mozart, frequently cast as the maid.  I spent my classical career pacing the floorboards and serving tea on stage, always the maid, never the Countess.  I became a bit – how should I say - artistically unfulfilled!"  She began to study journalism at NYU at night.

"On assignment for one of my first classes there," Charleston says, "I discovered a cover-up involving a major train crash in New York City by prowling around the bowels of Grand Central Station and talking to the workers.”  She tells the story.  "A Metro-North engineer was killed in an accident for which he was blamed, when actually, a fancy new Cab-signal system had malfunctioned, sending him full speed ahead around a turn where another train was parked. Instead of accepting the responsibility for the accident, Metro North blamed the engineer, an African-American gentleman from Mount Vernon.  They said he was high, a drug addict.  I visited his family, and got a hold of the autopsy report.  There were no drugs at all in his system when he died.  So I broke the story, and it ran in The Daily News and The New York Times.  It felt really good. You can change peoples' lives with this work." Immediately, Charleston found herself hired by ABC News, where she worked with Diane Sawyer at PrimeTime Live.  Including a final year at NBC News before leaving broadcast journalism to pursue motherhood and music, Charleston worked in television for six years, contributing to stories that won her Emmy and Peabody awards.

"I kept singing, though," she says, "I couldn't stop.  I ended up studying jazz singing for a few years while I was at ABC.  My teacher, Peter Eldridge of New York Voices, really brought me from classical to jazz, because there is a different vocal technique involved.  I began to sing sometimes in New York's Greenwich Village.  Diane would come, and she'd sing along, knowing all the words to the songs."  Perhaps performing in the Village, where decades before the young Bob Dylan and others began to forge ultimately world-famous notions of how songs might proceed in terrifically personal ways, Charleston began to glimpse some rich path for herself about how to consolidate all her influences. Certainly now, with her Motéma Music debut and fourth album overall, her songwriting holds its own with clear craft and vibrancy on a collection that includes the work of contemporary masters as diverse as Wonder and Jobim, and she is off to the creative races.

"I've always struggled with the natural ability of my own voice," she says, "I was afraid of it becoming too much the focus -- the voice, the voice, the voice."  On Who Knows Where the Time Goes Charleston's singing shines naturally, intricately and beautifully, concentrating without fail on the story, the story, the story.  

"My husband, my daughter and I were in Israel a couple of years ago," Charleston says of how she came to write “Land of Galilee,” the angular art-folk ballad that, with the contrasting rounded loveliness of its soaring choruses, is one of the collection's highlights.   She tells the story.  "We were walking around the outskirts of Jerusalem – which is in the middle of the desert, and is always hot and dry, when the skies opened up and it suddenly began to snow!  And everyone-- Jews, Muslims and Christians -- came out of their houses and cautiously started to play together - gently throwing snowballs, building snowmen, laughing and singing.  Not just children, but their parents and grandparents -- were all playing together!  And I just thought – what an amazing moment!   It goes to show that perhaps there could be peace, that peace is possible."    In her hopeful, optimistic lyric in "Land of Galilee" Rondi writes and sings, "And there was music, and there was harmony.  A silvery playground as far as the eyes could see.  Can you imagine the possibilities--in the Land of Galilee..."

Rondi Charleston is always telling a story.  As Who Knows Where the Time Goes demonstrates, her impulse to do that is the foundation, as well as the heart, of her thrilling singing and especially her original songs.