A toddler climbs towards the light. He then grows into a child who discovers the joy of flying a balloon. But that happiness pales in comparison to the elation he feels on discovering the guitar. It drives him to outer space, and he spends his adulthood learning how to make the instrument laugh and cry. A woman joins him along the way. They fall in love. They give birth to a daughter. And ultimately, that toddler grows into a 40-year-old man looking at the light again, but this time as a husband, a father and a musician who's embarking on his next journey in life.

That's the pictorial story on the cover of Blackstratblues's upcoming album, When It's Time, launching on September 12. It's an intensely personal endeavour where the city-based band's front man, Warren Mendonsa, has plucked out chapters from his unwritten autobiography and turned them into songs. He's travelled inwards into the recesses of his past. Mendonsa tells us, "The way I look at it, when you write an album, you look back at the music once it comes to you and ask yourself, 'Okay, what do I have here?' You then start sequencing the songs in a way that they tell a story. Coming to this album, I'm turning 40 this year. So you can look at each song as a little chunk of my life.