It was a rainy day in Montreal, I was kind of Blue having heard of the death of a close friend I had known since high school. I was reading The Atlantic magazine articles on line. I came across this one: https://www.theatlantic.com/press-releases/archive/2021/08/september-2021-cover-press-release/619694/ which is a story about how losing someone in 9/11 affected a family from the perspective of 20 years later. The story resonated with me.

While practicing my nylon string guitar later that morning I started playing a couple of chord sequences that caught my fancy. I was zoning out and started to ad lib words and “life loves on”stuck. I decided to try and build a song around that phrase. I love turns of phrase and tried many before settling on life loves on and love lives on which are subtly similar and yet somewhat different. The actual 4 note motif for “life loves on” fits the “Hallelujah” part from an old Anglican Hymn: “All Creatures Of Our God and King”

I was staring out the window at the teeming rain and the phrase “into each life some rain must fall” which I thought might be a bible verse because my mum had used it often. I googled the line, and It turned out it was a line in “The Rainy Day” written in 1842 after the death of his first wife, by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. The entire poem fit neatly into what I was trying to create, so, rather than re-invent the wheel, I set his poem to music with only a slight adaptation and some repetition.