Just A Song: Love's Recovery

SONG Love's Recovery

WRITTEN BY Emily Saliers

APPEARS ON Indigo Girls (1990), 1200 Curfews (1995), 4.5: The Best Of The Indigo Girls (1995, import), Artist's Choice: Sarah McLachlan (2004)

In this beautiful song, the Indigo Girls look back not on love lost but on the wisdom and perseverance gained by from broken love and how this leads to love that lasts. Although there's a certain amount of rueful hindsight at work ("I missed ten million miles of road I should have seen") the song depicts a journey of broken hearts that ultimately leads from "love's recovery" to "love's discovery."

One of the traps of love is envy of friends who seem to have it while you don't. Don't worry, Emily Saliers says, just because you can't see them doesn't mean that they don't have their problems, too:

Meanwhile our friends we thought were so together
They've all gone and left each other in search of fairer weather

In other words, one couple is just like another: The vision they present to the world differs greatly from reality. Eventually, they require "love's recovery" too.

"Love's Recovery" builds to the incredibly powerful expression of the worth of love in the last verse:

I wish I were a trinity, so if I lost a part of me
I'd still have two of the same to live

Love gains a religious force ("trinity") so profound that its worth losing oneself in the giving, no matter what the cost. But, of course,

nobody gets a lifetime rehearsal, as specks of dust we're universal
To let this love survive would be the greatest gift we could give

There's an aspect of endurance to true love, something that resists "fairer weather" and the "whims of culture." This part of love prevails despite fantasies of the unattainable ("picture perfect maps of how my love and life would be") and the intrusions of the rational ("the cancer of my intellect"). Perhaps it's not the glamor side of love, but it's what gets us through the "rain soaked and voice choked" times, the part that buys time for the "absolute distinction" of a couple's feeling to take root and flourish. Emily Saliers' lyrics and the Indigo Girls lush harmonies and impassioned vocals give voice to this part of love, the part without which love truly cannot survive.

LYRICS

During the time of which I speak it was hard to turn the other cheek

To the blows of insecurity
Feeding the cancer of my intellect the blood of love soon neglected
Lay dying in the strength of its impurity

Meanwhile our friends we thought were so together
They've all gone and left each other in search of fairer weather
And we sit here in our storm and drink a toast
To the slim chance of love's recovery.

There I am in younger days, star gazing,
Painting picture perfect maps of how my life and love would be
Not counting the unmarked paths of misdirection
My compass, faith in love's perfection
I missed ten million miles of road I should have seen

Meanwhile our friends we thought were so together
Left each other one by one in search of fairer weather
And we sit here in our storm and drink a toast
To the slim chance of love's recovery.

Rain soaked and voice choked like silent screaming in a dream
I search for our absolute distinction
Not content to bow and bent
To the whims of culture that swoop like vultures
Eating us away, eating us away
Eating us away to our extinction

Oh how I wish I were a trinity, so if I lost a part of me
I'd still have two of the same to live
But nobody gets a lifetime rehearsal, as specks of dust we're universal
To let this love survive would be the greatest gift we could give

Tell all the friends who think they're so together
That these are ghosts and mirages, these thoughts of fairer weather
Though it's storming out I feel safe within the arms of love's discovery