This song was written specifically for my wife, Alli. But it could be about anyone that you love. I find that being in love is about an intellectual connection, like Shakespeare wrote, “Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments,” and Alli and I have a connection like that: a marriage of true minds.

When I was doing my education degree in the states, most of the people at my university were, like me, from Canada. And whenever Alli went home for a bit, I was on the phone with her all night. One of my classmates who I found to be crass at times was complaining about how when his girlfriend back home called him he had nothing to say, and that talking to her was “the worst.” He asked me how I could talk to her for so long, and I asked him why he wanted to be with someone that he couldn’t talk to. I just didn’t get it.

When you’re with the one that you really love, you don’t need anybody else. At least, I don’t. I call the leather patches on tweed jackets that professors wear smoking patches, and I’m not really sure why. Where’d I pick that up? Anyway, what’s a tweed coat with no patches? And what am I without my girl?

Alli and I wanna travel! Also, this is a nod to Annie Lennox and Eurythmics' 1983 hit “Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This).” Which is a killer song and everybody knows it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qeMFqkcPYcg

Henry Miller was married to June Miller, both of whom became romantically entangled with the writer Anaïs Nin after Henry met her in Paris. This affair was kind of weird but also inspired a veritable shit-ton of great literature, including Nin’s multi-volume diary and Miller’s brilliantly debased novel Tropic of Cancer. Nin in particular has been a fascinating figure for us at times. She has good quotes.

We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.

In the inflection of my voice here I was trying to sound like Andrew McMahon of Something Corporate… how’d I do?

Charles Darwin is the father of evolutionary biology, the author of The Origin of Species, a great personal hero of mine, and also happens to be Alli’s great great uncle… or is it great great great? At any rate, her family’s related to him through the Wedgwood side of his family, making abolitionist Josiah Wedgwood another relative we’re proud of. Alli collects the pottery and even is thinking about getting a tattoo of the designs.

Boston Rob is the god of reality television, having won Survivor and also won The Amazing Race, I think the only person to do that. A Machiavellian (Hobbesian?) mastermind, who reads people like a book and then gets them to do whatever he wants. He played the game twice without winning, and then came back for a third go… and won, dammit! Alli and I were spellbound every time. It’s like watching a symphony. So orchestrated…

Thomas Hobbes is, of course, the 18th-century English political theorist who wrote Leviathan, which is a book about how society keeps us all in line, but also provides us all with things that better our standard of living. TH is the sort of thinker that Alli and I’d talk about… although tbh, I’m not sure we ever have. It was the rhyme with “Boston Rob” that I was really going for!