Still the First Time

Track five is the title track, and it is a marriage song - but notice where it places the marriage. Before the world. Before the sun. Before a breath. We were one. The covenant did not begin at a porch light in the snow, and it did not begin with a license. The paper came later. The license was a line. The covenant was written before there was a time.

This is the album's whole thesis sung tenderly. The framework songs argued that the substance precedes the form. This song lives inside that truth at the level of one marriage. The wedding was a rendering. The real thing - two people made one - was a thought in the Author's mind before either of them had a name. And that is why the chorus can say what it says. Every time I find you, still the first time. Thirty years in, the same shy hand still trembles, because what holds the marriage is not the wearing-in of habit. It is a covenant older than both of them.

And the song is not afraid of the grave. A stone is already cut, two names, one side. But it calls the grave only the seam between what the Author writes. The rendering will lift, the constraints will fall, and the covenant that held us will hold us through it all. I will find you again - in the morning of forever. A love that was real before the world began does not end at a seam. It is, and was, and will be, still the first time.