9. God Is Love (3:09) Words & Music by Steve Gillette

In 1990, Cindy and I bought a digital-audio tape recorder. The first thing we did was to take it to my dad's house and set up a microphone at his old upright piano. He started into a familiar medley of tunes from his teen-age years, "Honeysuckle Rose," "Ain't Misbehavin'" and "Dark Town Strutter's Ball." Songs I'd heard him play all my life.

I was able to use his performance of "Sunny Side of the Street" from that session on my concept story album "The Man." In my life, musically speaking he was definitely the man, but in the story there are many authority figures from different realms, from Franklin D. Roosevelt in the White House to Frankie Trumbaur who famously played trombone for the Paul Whiteman Orchestra.

The hero of my story was a young street waif, an orphan rescued by a musical family who grows up to have a career as a musician. He gets to know many of the luminaries in the nascent jazz era, and he and his adopted brother Johnny build a reputation and a catalog of songs. In all, he has a wonderful life, but at the end he finds himself alone. He has lost his cherished wife, and their son, who is named after his uncle Johnny, has died in World War II. In my narration for the recording I say:

"Without Lorraine, Danny would retreat into his music with a kind of monk-like resignation. He lived for ideas, and for the perfection of a song. He and Johnny would work, but then he didn't really have anybody else he could relate to. There was Young Johnny of course. But Young Johnny had graduated from college and was on his own.

"Danny did a lot of his best writing during this time, but his search for some universal truth about the big issues, life and death, would take sacrifice, especially during the War. In the last few days of the battle for Europe, Little Johnny’s transport went down in the English Channel. Nothing was ever found.

"Danny had to admit that he had learned very little about the world, and less about himself. A part of him was still that feral child cringing in some squalid crawlspace, swaddled in newspapers against the mean, gray cold. Was there anything he could say about the eternal — something he could honestly pass along? He put the best of his thoughts into a song and then he never wrote another."

Lyrically, the song is as simple as the old laments, the precursors to the blues tradition. There is some consideration given to building the case that the old cliché, "God is love," might actually be literally true — that it might be an ideal which can have merit in our time, possibly in a new way.

If I have prepared for any moment of realization in the song, it's when I get to say, "only love, nothing more, nothing less." The "nothing more" phrase might be seen as controversial, possibly heretical to much of traditional religious doctrine, but the phrase "nothing less" is what I really want to say.

That's the part that calls upon us to recognize the power of our own intentionality, and to take responsibility for our actions and our spiritual potential. It's why I wrote the song.

God Is Love

Words & Music by Steve Gillette, © 2010, Compass Rose Music, BMI

Read more on my About the Song website here