» Love You Enough

Jim Keiter is a great songwriter and a farmer in Wilmington,  Ohio.  I don't remember how we came to collaborate, but I distinctly remember meeting in the Living Word Church in Middletown and talking about what it's like to raise children.  Jim did not have kids of his own at the time, but he has corrected that problem since then.

Both of us were very proud of this song.  We worked very hard trying to come up with images of delicacy that were nevertheless invulnerable to the greatest forces.

About the opening line - I was sitting in a Friendly's restaurant with my daughter, who was eight at the time, and I was just enjoying her energy and joy.  The line, "Like a breath of sunlight" came to me at the time, and I've stuck with it despite literalists' complaints that you can't breathe sunlight.  I beg to differ.

Jim Keiter made a visit to the NSAI Spring Symposium and ended up playing the song for a professional songwriter at Starstruck named Tia Siller.  She was blown away by the song and asked if she could take it with her back to Starstruck.  She performed later that week in Tin Pan South, and Jim approached her again.  She was still excited about the song and told him she was showing it to everyone.

Jim never heard any more from her about it, but within the year, she and Mark D. Sanders wrote a little ditty callled "I Hope You Dance."  The songs have similar themes, of course, and Jim and I both like to think that we may have provided Tia the inspiration - conscious or unconscious - for one of the greatest hit songs ever released.

One more note about the song's life.  When I was first hired to work at Mound Street Academies - a school focused on giving high school dropouts the chance to earn a high school diploma - I played this song for my colleagues in the weeks before the school first opened.  Since then it has been incorporated into our graduation ceremonies year after year.