Love Is Not the Only Thing

Another in my series of Mark Heard gems. This from his 1991 album, Second Hand.  He was truly one of the best I’ve ever been around.  You can hear the song on the Youtube link below.

Sun rises and we talk about the weather

Sun bleaches and we ponder it all

The fine line between the banker and the debtor

And what happens if the satellites fall

Too shy we are to come right out and say it

Too sly to let the other one know

Head full of this kaleidoscope of brain-freight

Heart full of something simple and slow

Love is not the only thing

It's the best thing

Love is never everything

But it's the best thing

Too tired to read another twenty pages

Too bored to see the anchorman's face

Too young to bear the burdens of the ages

Too old to keep an innocent pace

You see me like a prism sees a candle

I'm scattered into differing hues

Reality is happening at random

You're warming up the yellows and blues

Love is not the only thing

It's the best thing

Love is never everything

But it's the best thing

Let's go up on the roof beneath the neon

Pretend we're foreigners and drink the city in

Somewhere between the stairwell
and the starlight

I find myself holding your hand

Half-cousins to the angels and the demons

Half-brother to the fatherless sons

I lay awake and wonder at the reasons

One kiss and I am lost in your charms

Love is not the only thing

It's the best thing

Love is never everything

But it's the best thing

Written by Mark Heard
© 1991 Ideola Music/ASCAP

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3zqm2F7ccGo&feature=related

Meditations on the Muse

While spending a few days this week with Kerry Livgren, who has to be one of the most musical people I have ever been blessed to know, I have pondered the gift that is music. Here are various thoughts on the same from others. Let me know which ones resonate with you…


A painter paints pictures on canvas. But musicians paint their pictures on silence. ~Leopold Stokowski

Music washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life. ~Berthold Auerbach

Without music life would be a mistake. ~Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

Take a music bath once or twice a week for a few seasons. You will find it is to the soul what a water bath is to the body. ~Oliver Wendell Holmes

If a composer could say what he had to say in words he would not bother trying to say it in music. ~Gustav Mahler

Why waste money on psychotherapy when you can listen to the B Minor Mass? ~Michael Torke

Music was my refuge. I could crawl into the space between the notes and curl my back to loneliness. ~Maya Angelou

Were it not for music, we might in these days say, the Beautiful is dead. ~Benjamin Disraeli

Music is what feelings sound like. ~Author Unknown

If I ever die of a heart attack, I hope it will be from playing my stereo too loud. ~Anonymous

There's music in all things, if men had ears:
Their earth is but an echo of the spheres. ~Lord Byron

Musical compositions, it should be remembered, do not inhabit certain countries, certain museums, like paintings and statues. The Mozart Quintet is not

shut up in Salzburg: I have it in my pocket. ~Henri Rabaud

Music is the poetry of the air. ~Richter

There is nothing in the world so much like prayer as music is. ~William P. Merrill

Music is the mediator between the spiritual and the sensual life. ~Ludwig van Beethoven

Life can't be all bad when for ten dollars you can buy all the Beethoven sonatas and listen to them for ten years. ~William F. Buckley, Jr.

Music is the wine that fills the cup of silence. ~Robert Fripp

Music's the medicine of the mind. ~John A. Logan

Music is the universal language of mankind. ~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Outre-Mer

He who hears music, feels his solitude peopled at once. ~Robert Browning

Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent. ~Victor Hugo

Music has been my playmate, my lover, and my crying towel. ~Buffy Sainte-Marie

Music is the art which is most nigh to tears and memory. ~Oscar Wilde

Its language is a language which the soul alone understands, but which the soul can never translate. ~Arnold Bennett

Music expresses feeling and thought, without language; it was below and before speech, and it is above and beyond all words. ~Robert G. Ingersoll

Music is the literature of the heart; it commences where speech ends. ~Alphonse de Lamartine

When words leave off, music begins. ~Heinrich Heine

Music is the shorthand of emotion. ~Leo Tolstoy

A jazz musician is a juggler who uses harmonies instead of oranges. ~Benny Green

Silence is the fabric upon which the notes are woven. ~Lawrence Duncan

Music produces a kind of pleasure which human nature cannot do without. ~Confucius

Music is love in search of a word. ~Sidney Lanier

It is incontestable that music induces in us a sense of the infinite and the contemplation of the invisible. ~Victor de LaPrade

Music is moonlight in the gloomy night of life. ~Jean Paul Richter

I worry that the person who thought up Muzak may be thinking up something else. ~Lily Tomlin

Thoughts?