First of all, let me say thanks to my brother (and Best Man) Jim for posting this compliment. Both to Joe, the band, and to my dancing. The former both well deserved, the latter, not so much. ;-)
The song has always been special to us, and I was glad we were (after many months and several hundred dollars-worth of lessons!) able to pull off enough moves to do it justice for our first dance. I cannot wait to see this video Jim's refering to. Hand it over, brother!!!
Anyway, it is encouraging to see the spirited back-and-forth of the responses. It just continues to support and prove what I wrote in a post more than a year ago:
It's interesting. The first time my girlfriend and I heard this song (live at the Tangier in Akron a few months back), we interpreted it as a song emphasizing the enormity and completeness of love, and how one never wants to lose it, but wants to carry it with them to the "next place."
The song hit us so hard that we immediately knew it was going to be (one of) our wedding songs. Now, having gotten Y&M and listened to the song, oh, 50 or so times, it just occured to me that Joe might be singing about a lost loved one, as Jane wrote about in a previous post. Which, of course, got me to thinking about its appropriateness for a wedding.
For about a minute.
The beauty of the song (and the blues; and music in general) is that it doesn't matter. Whatever YOU take from any song is what's most important. So thanks to (I think) Mark Himmelstein for writing, and Joe for singing and playing, one of the most soulful, emotional and beautiful songs I've heard in a long while.