Songs for Saturday: The River

Yesterday I wrote about the "River" posts, and said that I would say more about the song that gave its name to the tag, "The River" [ogg] [mp3]. That would be this post.

I have, of course, written about "The River" before -- I posted a link to the lyrics the morning after I wrote it, and full lyrics and a first cut at the audio almost exactly 12 hours later. (If you look closely you'll see that some of the lyrics have changed since then, and I'm not sure what became of the original recording.) But that was 2008, and I didn't start the "Songs for Saturday" series until 2011. So I get to do it again. Some people think it's my best love song, but you should probably listen to "Eyes Like the Morning" first and make up your own mind.

This song is perhaps the purest example of me chasing a metaphor wherever it leads me, and having no idea where I'm going until I get there. I started out thinking about my deepening friendship with N (this was about a month before we chose one another as siblings), and one line:

It's a river so deep that we can't see the bottom...

... but eighteen hours later it ended up applying even more strongly to my relationship with Colleen, to whom I was able to present it on a CD of (mostly) love songs on Valentine's day. I'm usually too close to my songs to tell whether they're any good, but if I get choked up or cry while I'm writing them, I have a pretty good idea.

( lyrics, if you don't want to click through: )