Love Is Love

Album: Downhill From Everywhere (2020)
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Songfacts®:

  • Jackson Browne's trips to Haiti inspired this homage to the trouble-torn country. The song focuses on the Haitian people who "work and live and love and struggle every day." Browne told the UK newspaper The Sun: "The poverty is so omnipresent but what you're left with is this incredible spirit."
  • The fourth verse of this Latin excursion speaks of Father Rick Frechette. Father Rick arrived in Haiti as a priest, but the citizens told him they needed a doctor, not a priest. So he went to medical school, became a doctor, and returned to the island. There, he lives in a tiny room in a hospital with few possessions while traveling around the slums on his motorbike.

    "So many people are drawn to this place by unusual callings," Browne told Uncut magazine. "The Catholic priest I mention in 'Love Is Love' is Father Rick Frechette, who gets around Haiti on a motorbike with a phalanx of former gang members who protect him because it's a rough place. He's a really inspirational figure to so many people - he's built a school, he's built a hospital. He baptizes the new born and buries the dead. And it's the kind of religious life that's lived at such a primal level and its very moving."
  • Browne first traveled to Haiti in 2014 when he visited a school and music studio set up by the charity Artists for Peace and Justice in the wake of the 2010 earthquake. That trip, and the poverty he witnessed, inspired the title track of Browne's subsequent album, Standing in the Breach. The album cover is a photo taken two days after the earthquake struck the country's capital, Port-au-Prince.

    During two 2016 visits, Browne brought along an international group of musicians and recorded a benefit album, Let the Rhythm Lead: Haiti Song Summit Vol. 1. Released on January 31, 2020, it includes this song. Browne subsequently included the track on his 2021 album Downhill From Everywhere.
  • Haiti occupies the western, smaller portion of the island of Hispaniola in the Greater Antillean archipelago, which it shares with the Dominican Republic. Here are more songs inspired by the troubled country:

    "Haiti" by Arcade Fire
    "Stranded (Haiti Mon Amour)" by Jay-Z, Bono, The Edge & Rihanna
    "We Are The World: 25 For Haiti" by Artists For Haiti
    "Everybody Hurts" by Helping Haiti
    "Haitian Divorce" by Steely Dan
    "Election Time" by Wyclef Jean

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