After the passage of Proposition 8 in California I was angry. Very Angry.
When they repealed gay marriage in Maine my anger was washed away and all I was left with was hurt. I remember crying myself to sleep that night thinking that equality was hopeless. We could pass laws, but as long as people held hatred in their hearts no change would last. I woke up the next morning with a strange calm. I took my songbook with me as I boarded the subway to go to another day of work at a soul crushing day job.
As I sat on the train I just began to write how I felt and it came flowing out from a place of resigned honesty. There was no anger left, and the song came out uninterrupted. By the time I reached my stop, I had written the complete lyric in its song form. I have never written a song like that in my life.
After work, I rushed to a small practice room at NYU and the music flowed out as easily as the words had and in less than a half an hour the song was written. I knew right away that the song was special because of the way it came out intact and also the way it felt to play.
After sharing it with some friends, I decided to play it at an the open mic at Caffe Vivaldi, where I try out a lot of my songs. The room was packed that night and I was a bit nervous to play such a political and personal song. While the song is definitely political, it also is the most personal song I have ever written. As I played, I became very emotional and I realized that performing this song was definitely going to open up very raw parts of myself every time.
When I finished, the room erupted into applause like I have never received. People began to stand and I saw tears in peoples' eyes. I have never seen that kind of response at an open mic before. After I got off stage, people came up to me and told me how much it meant to hear someone say those things. I had a straight man come up to me and tell me that he had never thought of the issue that way and said it had totally changed his view on it. That is the kind of response a writer always dreams of.
I kept playing the song to huge responses and my producer, Mark Marshall told me we had to pause recording my album and record the track immediately. We did, and we were able to recruit the amazing talent of Michael Leonhart (Grammy Award winning horn player) to put the horns on the album. The recording process was emotional and amazing and just continued my feeling that this song was different than anything I had ever written.
I am very excited to share this with you all, and I truly hope it can reach people and make them see this very personal issue in a new way.
Love.
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