All my life, I've been someone almost pathologically interested in holding on to everything. I attached everything to myself; every one. Even if they left. Even if they were never really there. And I took everything with me, no matter where I went.
As I've gotten older, I've retrained myself to be less attached, less obsessed with forever and with keeping things. Luckily, I still get to excise my feelings about that early desire to make everything last forever by writing songs.
This song was a gift in that way. I'm not sure I would have ever let myself write a song where the central idea was as basic as "Love Will Stay." I would have tried to say it some more clever way. Something newer. And that would have been a mistake. But instead, I inherited the really solid bones of one of the most beautiful songs I'd ever heard. I remember re-working this song like a puzzle on bus, coasting through up state New York.
I wasn't about to die, like Alix knows she is, but I knew how she felt. And in the end, the song also got to ask the central questions that Nicholas & Alexandra asks as a whole: what lives on after something dies? What remains after we are gone? What stays? Your work? What if it was your work that got you into trouble in the first place? So then it's love, right? It was for Alix. I hope it will be for me too.
Here's Janet Dacal, singing a military-march/pop mix of the song we're still selling loads of sheet music for (thanks, guys) from the Lincoln Center concert, one week ago.
No comments:
Post a Comment