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

This song is from my ambitious story and song project called "The Man." In the dawn of the Jazz Age, young Danny Murrow grows into his own musical identity and encounters some of the greats of the day. At the end of his life, having lost all that mattered to him, he writes one last song. Refusing to say what many would have wanted him to say, he instead says what he truly believes.

In what I’ve been calling as "audio novel," Danny is contemplating the meaning of his life after the loss of his wife and son. 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 his brother 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.

(BMI)

Read more on my About the Song website here