I Believe In Love

Album: Despite Our Differences (2006)
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Songfacts®:

  • Emily Saliers and Amy Ray of the Indigo Girls write separately, and Saliers wrote this song. Says Saliers: "It's the first song I've ever written on ukulele, and I think sometimes the instrument you pick up can guide what kind of song comes out. I'm not going to write a rock song on ukulele, obviously, so the chord progression felt sweet, and I always have sort of like a collective pool of thought up there somewhere, or things that I've written down. And the chord progression just led me, for whatever reason, to just think about relationships, and using images of birds in the trees and what that portends, and the image of coffee growing cold in a cup to represent things growing stale or old or not vibrant. And then also explaining what happens, like over time how separation happens, but at the core of every strong relationship is the friendship and the love. When you strip everything away, all the complexities, that's what you have, and that's what I believe in. It's a song about personal struggle and relationship, and how you can make it work in the end, and just believing in the power of love despite the complexities of life that try to pull it apart."
  • A line in this song, "I still believe despite our differences that what we have's enough," provided the title of the album. Says Saliers: "We had a really hard time naming this record, the hardest one. And Amy was just looking through lyrics, and she landed on that line. You know, it comes from a love song, but it's meant to point to the fact that while she and I are very different for obvious reasons, we've been able to maintain this career and friendship for 20+ years, and also in a global context how we can, despite our differences as peoples, or cultures, or countries, or whatever it is, we can co-exist without destroying each other. So that's the hope and that's the belief, and finally we just settled on that line." (Check out our interview with Emily Saliers. The official Indigo Girls website is indigogirls.com.)

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