“How many love songs have I written in my life? Perhaps countless. And yet I keep trying. It’s simply the most fascinating subject to explore, and music is certainly its language.
When wife, Julia, and I were first married, after just 3 months of marital bliss, she won the role in Kurt Weill’s opera “Lady In The Dark” and went off to the Palermo Opera in Italy to do the show … for 3 months!! Timing: lousy. Excited for her, but not at all for my own plight. Missing her was excruciating. I suffered daily. Terrible internet communication and no phone. Only letters. I will never forget my struggles. Burned into my soul indelibly.
Then a year later she went off to the Rome Opera to do the same show for yet another three months. Same very tough experience for me.
Love is the magic elixir of our lives. Love is the wondrous stimulus that we all search for and require every day. And sometimes love … just hurts.
Back then I wrote a very good song called “Leaving You” after a short visit to Rome when I couldn’t take the parting any longer, but even that song didn’t cover all the ramifications of that parting.
So, this year, almost 20 years later, when she got another one of those ‘faraway for too long’ roles, the feelings, the fragments, the leftovers of that time gone by came rushing back. How was I to manage?