Then came a storm. Not of sound, but of emotion. He began to play a flurry of notes, a galloping, passionate theme that seemed to race across a plain. It was powerful, but it was still just one piano. He realized it was a letter to his younger self, the boy who dreamed of leaving Greece to find music. He titled it “One Man’s Dream.”

Each piece was recorded in a single, unbroken take. If a single note felt wrong—not out of tune, but emotionally untrue—he would stop, breathe, and start the entire piece over from the beginning. The studio engineer, Peter Baumann, learned to read Yanni’s shoulders. If they dropped, the take was dead. If they stayed lifted, like wings in a glide, the magic was happening.

The title track, “In My Time,” arrived as a confession. It was the simplest piece on the album—almost childlike in its melody—but beneath it, Yanni wove a subtle, aching harmonic shift. It was the sound of realizing that time is not a river you swim in, but a tide that carries you. You can’t fight it. You can only play through it. When the album was mastered, the label executives were nervous. There were no hit singles. No “Santorini.” No driving 7/8 rhythm. It was just Yanni and his ghosts.

And so, in 1993, In My Time was born. The making of the album was an act of radical restraint. Yanni would enter the studio at midnight, when Los Angeles finally fell silent. He lit a single lamp. He sat at a nine-foot Steinway concert grand. There were no click tracks, no computers, no edits.

One letter arrived at Yanni’s office from a woman in Nebraska. She wrote: “My husband was a soldier. He never cried. He listened to ‘Until the Last Moment’ the night before he left for his final deployment. He left it on repeat. Thank you for giving him a way to say goodbye that he couldn’t say with words.”