If You'll Be My Home
A bunch of things influenced this. Michael and I had just gotten married. I had been reading the Song of Solomon. There's a Proverb (31:10) "Who can find a virtuous woman? for her price is far above rubies." Someone I'd met just before the wedding suggested that I read that passage--that whole 31st chapter of Proverbs. I thought, uh-oh... could be one of those 'submit' passages. But it wasn't, it's actually advice from a mother to a son about making a good choice for a wife and talks about the strength of a household when both partners are devoted to each other and the union. I think it says just as much about the writer (31:1 says, "The words of King Lemuel, the prophecy that his mother taught him.) as the subject.
Relationships are a tricky balance and so many women lose themselves to their partners. I wanted to express how I felt about my marriage without sounding weak, because I certainly haven't lost myself. And that had been a huge fear of mine since I was old enough to start recognizing the complications of love. So I went back to the Song of Solomon because some Bible scholars suggest that it is about Jesus' relationship with the church, the marriage of the two. And I thought that if I expressed the same sort of thoughts, like if I used the Song of Solomon as a guideline for expressing my feelings that I'd be pretty safe in an honest outcome... because those ideas are timeless.
This song has two electric guitars, bass and drums. David and Luke put tremolo on the guitars, and that watered them up a bit but I still thought the whole picture was a little bare. I was worried about this and Daniel (engineer) was saying that I should have at least one song on the CD that was not brimming with instruments. When it came time to mix this song, Daniel started the tape, adjusted the instrument levels and brought my vocal in, and then he did the most amazing thing--he cranked up the reverb in the guitars and made them so darn watery and beautiful that I thought I was swimming at night in the big ol' Gulf of Mexico under a bright, starry sky. It was such a perfect sound to me that I made Daniel burn me a copy of the song at the end of that night's session and I went home and listened to that one song, over and over until the sun came up. And then I went to bed.
