“music you have felt but not heard” – “Rose Coloured Lights” single cover.

This is one of those “elephant in the room” albums – Diana is L. Ron Hubbard’s daughter. I discovered this album 3 or 4 years ago after reading Lawrence Wright’s Going Clear, a superb deep-dive on the scandolous history of Scientology. When, amongst detailing the Scientology clan’s bizarre adventure as a self-governing ship (literally) in the Mediterranean, it was mentioned that daughter Diana recorded a jazz album with legendary pianist and avowed Scientologist Chick Corea, my interest was piqued.

LifeTimes was released on the small Minneapolis label Waterhouse in 1979, who seem to have released mostly blues rock records, as well as a comedy album, Henny Youngman’s Take My Album, Please! (track #5: “What, No Jewish Jokes?”). The sheltered life of Scientology progeny Diana Hubbard, who went to music conservatory in London before studying Scientology and spending years on the group’s Mediterranean yacht, lends her music the feeling of an alien’s idea of classical or new age music. “Russian Roulette” (ominous track title, no?) is pretty, yet uneasy, with Hubbard’s piano playing sounding both sustained and clunky. The liner notes to LifteTimes contain penned notes describing each song, with this bizarre entry for “Russian Roulette”: “An arch-duke of Russia travelling [sic] across the plains of Siberia, came to a forest. He had known love, wealth, power, pain and the Napoleon Wars. He had done and experienced everything of his day. He plays Russian Roulette and dies in the forest.”

“Bewitched” features some bugged-out synthesizer work from the aforementioned Chick Corea, who just 10 years earlier played electric piano on Bitches Brew. In comparison, a contemporary review of LifeTimes by the Harvard Crimson called it “Dentists’ Office Jazz”. Like most muzak, LifeTimes is directionless and mostly uneventful. It even contains a vaguely-ethnic-sounding track called “Arabia”. But in its meandering sonatas it is strangely successful ambient music, and absolutely uncanny in the context of its creation.

Some may call it dreck, or just plain boring, but I genuinely enjoy this oddity of an album. To my knowledge Diana Hubbard has not released other music, and little is publicly known about her life. I’ll leave you with Hubbard’s handwritten description for the final track, “Midnight #3”: “A sea rippling quietly with the moon. The cliffs tower. Maybe you heard the sirens.”

Listen to LifeTimes here.