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  1. Love Is Real

From the recording Miracle Of Forgetting (2003)

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Written on my 29th birthday at a friend’s lake house in Georgia. For some reason, Danielle agreed to let me bring my guitar along on this, our anniversary getaway. Since we weren’t allowing ourselves to watch TV (except for the LSU football game), I devoted time to reading, photography, sitting, staring blankly out on the dock. I also managed to write two songs that weekend – this particular one on 10/3/01 (11 pm – 12:30 am).

I had been reading Flannery O’Connor at the time and, while finishing A Good Man is Hard to Find, began reading The Spectator Bird (Wallace Stegner) that same weekend.

This is a song that presented itself to me without provocation. It bore no teeth and put up little resistance. Its creation was a chance encounter with “inspiration”, if that’s the right word. I write so very few songs this rapidly and even fewer in a single, short sitting. Though I do love it when they’re born this way – the wind at my back, the sky brimming clear, the timing perfect – I’ve always felt that my better songs were written in a monumental hour or two of uninhibited and unrestrained overflowing. I wish there were more of these.

Lyrics

Love Is Real

Better clean out my pockets
Better check my shoes
Gotta handful of heartache
And a hole in my blues

A little rest for the weary
A little sleep for my eyes
I’ve been trying hard just to keep our dream alive
Always is better

love is real
love is on the other side
love is real
love is from the inside
love is real
love looks for what is lost
love is real
love tears down these walls

if wishes were water
I should’ve wished like a saint
like an S.O.S. call
that’s ever so faint

if the answers are easy
then the questions must be wrong
I’m about out of luck
and tired of drawing these straws
always is better, always is best

love is real
love is on the other side
love is real
love is from the inside
love is real
love looks for what is lost
love is real
love tears down these walls

that stand so tall
we built to stay
but I would not have it any other way