In Spite of Ourselves

After all theses years (it will be 6 years next week!), Gia and I have finally found our song. Should I capitalize the OUR in that phrase? I dunno. We've had songs that we've connected with before. "Romeo and Juliet" by Dire Straits. "Please Call Me Baby" by Tom Waits. Stuff like that. But those songs, awesome as they are, are about doomed/twisted relationships that don't really work out.  Not so with this one.

And what's really interesting is that we both found it separately within about three months of each other. I heard it first one day while working with Pandora playing in the background. Several times a day, I will lift my head from my laptop and spreadsheets and stop to listen to a song that might not be new but is new to me. "In Spite of Ourselves" by John Prine with Iris DeMent was one of those songs. I'll then jot the song and artist down on a e-stickynote I keep open in the background. Usually to either share with Gia, buy on iTunes or post on this here space sometime in the future.

Then Gia was watching this movie with Billy Bob Thornton called Daddy and Them. A labor of love for the man who wrote and directed the film. He got his friend John Prine to take a supporting role in the film. And he got him to write a song for the film as well. This one. Prine talks about that a bit at the beginning of the video below.

So she purchased the song on iTunes and one late afternoon while we were enjoying a Summer Ramble, it popped on. I immediately started singing along. She was a bit confused because she thought she was going to introduce me to my new favorite song. I was confused because I had thought I had introduced it to her months ago. I'm still not sure that I hadn't. Maybe I did, but she didn't really "hear" it until she watched that film. Hard to say. Doesn't really matter because we proceeded to listen to it 5 or 6 times in a row that evening. And we fell in love with it and each other all over again. Music can be incredibly powerful that way.

This song makes us ridiculously happy. Because it's a ridiculously happy song. And because we found it separately yet for each other at the same time. Or something like that.

Enjoy!