How many love songs have I written in my life? Perhaps countless. And yet I keep trying. It’s simply the most fascinating subject to explore, and music is certainly its language.

When wife, Julia, and I were first married, after just 3 months of marital bliss, she won the role in Kurt Weill’s opera “Lady In The Dark” and went off to the Palermo Opera in Italy to do the show … for 3 months!! Timing: lousy. Excited for her, but not at all for my own plight. Missing her was excruciating. I suffered daily. Terrible internet communication and no phone. Only letters. I will never forget my struggles. Burned into my soul indelibly.

Then a year later she went off to the Rome Opera to do the same show for yet another three months. Same very tough experience for me.

Love is the magic elixir of our lives. Love is the wondrous stimulus that we all search for and require every day. And sometimes love … just hurts.

Back then I wrote a very good song called “Leaving You” after a short visit to Rome when I couldn’t take the parting any longer, but even that song didn’t cover all the ramifications of that parting.

So, this year, almost 20 years later, when she got another one of those ‘faraway for too long’ roles, the feelings, the fragments, the leftovers of that time gone by came rushing back. How was I to manage?

So, I wrote this Anthem to my wife. My catharsis, perhaps. Certainly a tribute to the incredible power and splendor of Love.

Anthem

Music and Lyrics by Peter Link

She lives in my heart always
She lies in the long grass
She weeps and my world crumbles
But when she smiles
Then the sun dances with the moon

She’s warm on a cold morning
There lying beside me
I wake from my old slumber
And cherish this wrinkle in time
That’s over too soon

She is soooooooo sweet
She is soooooooo smooth indeed
Soooooooo tuned
To the birds in our window
She is all girl.
All a whirl
And she’s all I’ve ever wanted
Never knowing what I wanted
Till she smiled at me

She laughs and the sky tumbles
She lights up my world
But when she leaves I am lost and humbled
Biding my time
Counting the days
Watching the clock
Checking the phone
Wishing the hours away
Till she comes home again
Till she comes home again

{Interlude}

I wake on this cold morning
And cling to that mem’ry
Of that girl in the grass
And her smile and her laughs
And the sun dancing with the moon