You Are The Only One I Need (Part 5)

If you want to understand this song, you can just listen to it. 

"Just a Spark" ends act one, and "You Are the Only One I Need" is a bit like the intermission.  It's an unusual song to start the album with for that reason, but it makes sense on another level. I had written the first four songs within a month of my being at Kenyon, and then the writing for this album paused. I was still doing plenty of writing. I was working with Jon Adams, Dan Levine and Dave Le Compte doing Gear's Apostle music, which in turn inspired an album of Satori songs that I wrote that first semester. 

The album took a pause, because I went from being inside my head, to outside in the world.  There was so much to experience that first semester. I was in Macbeth, which ended up being a very mediocre production, and one that many of us involved with knew was not going to work. I remember being asked to grow out my beard, which wasn't really possible at that point in time, so I just looked scraggly. 

The play almost made me miss meeting Allen Ginsberg. We had to rehearse the night he performed, and I was very disappointed, but it turns out he was giving a short reading the next day, and I showed up for that. Afterward, I invited myself to lunch with him. It's a bit strange meeting someone who had such an enormous impact on the world in which you live.  In hindsight, the most interesting thing he said was that Americans don't know how to grieve. It's interesting how much that idea applied to that moment in my life. 

See, I was mourning the loss of something. A sense of self? But I was unable to grieve about it, and therefore unable to let go. But then, the dark clouds seemed to lift for a while. 

 After that first semester, I went home, and I had the chance to reconnect with friends. One night I was expecting my friends Dan and Hewett to come by, and we were going to go somewhere.  At some point between dinner and they're arrival, I wrote this song. That might explain why its so short. I think I thought that I was going to finish it later, but when I came back to it, it seemed finished. 

The first time you might hear it, you might think that this song is about romantic love. In fact, I might have had that idea lodged in my head at some point, but now I can tell that this song is a hymn to the divine feminine. 

Now I had been raised Episcopalian, and God was always a man in that story. One might think that any divine being would be devoid of gender, but it was very hard to erase the idea of God the father. But there was no mother in that story. I mean, Mary is the mother, but she is not divine. She is very much human. 

Over the years, I have developed an intuitive sense of the Goddess.  She is very different from God the father. She is capable of ruthless vengeance, and warm-hearted compassion. Songs like "Guardian Angel" and "Broken Rules" capture both sides of her personality.  The Moon Goddess is one of her incarnations, and the moon is a perfect symbol for her, because she changes- or so it seems. 

Now the sun is the father, and there is much to be grateful for when it comes to the sun, but the sun is distant, and the moon is right here. We might not see it, but we feel it all the time. The sun hits us in our mind, but the moon hits us in our heart.  

Now the mother, like all mothers, sometimes drags you places that you don't want to go. These darker places sometimes result in deep suffering, but your mother is only doing it for your own good. Your heart needs to go through those dark places to evolve. 

It's interesting, because one of that themes that year was romantic disconnect. If you are a straight man attuned to the goddess, it can't play havoc with your love-life sometimes. Women aren't just women sometimes, because they become reflections of the goddess, and thus every woman becomes all women, and that doesn't work. I can't imagine having to be god for someone else- I'm too human. I've since come to see that women (like men) do have a divine spark in them, but they also have a heavy dose of earth as well.

I find it interesting that I wrote this song at the darkest time of the year near the winter solstice. I remember this, because I remember Dan and Hewett coming to take me to Trina Fischer's winter solstice party.  It's interesting how many holidays from that time of year (Christmas, Hannukah) all have a theme of light. We should be joyful because even in our darkest times, there's light.

This song represents a moment of gratitude, and I thought it a fitting opener to the album, because it seems like there's so much darkness throughout.  You need this song for context.  The darkness isn't their to create unnecessary suffering, but to promote growth. Of course I wrote this over my winter break. It was the darkest time of the year, but with a little reflection, I was able to see the joy. 

I think the Goddess was giving me strength for what was about to come.

Dewey Kincade: Vocals, Keys, Guitars, mandolin
Tonya Buckler: Backing Vocals
Jeff Faith: Upright Bass