Perfect Love

Album: Marc Cohn (1991)
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Songfacts®:

  • This song tells the story of a couple whose love sustains them while the world changes around them. While it affirms Cohn's faith in love, it also reflects his beliefs that America is headed downhill socially and politically. In his 1992 interview with Q magazine, he explained that his favorite lyrics on the album are: "They worked one summer together/at the '64 World's Fair, They met Robert Kennedy there/ Well that was right before the fall." Said Cohn: "That's the season and the Fall with a capital 'F'. It's about my brother and his wife. It was a love story happening when America was falling apart at the seams. The assassinations, Vietnam, the race riots. Even when you were six or seven you felt it. To me now those people dying, the Kennedys, Martin Luther King, was the beginning of the end for America. The first thing that opened my eyes about where America was going was when I was 13 and I campaigned for George McGovern. I went to this shopping mall outside Cleveland collecting money - and I got spat on. Just a kid and they spat on me! It's been a long time since there's been anybody who I've felt has spoken to me on any kind of level at all, politically, socially. That's very scary. It's strange such a young country should feel so old with the people we have coming in and out of office."
  • Why are the couple in this song hearing voices singing "it's a small world after all?" Because the popular Disney song "It's A Small World" was written for the 1964 World's Fair. And you know it's impossible to get that song out of your head once it burrows in.

Comments: 1

  • Volker from Hamburg"Loosely based on the arc of the love affair between one of my older brothers and his wife. The song follows them from Shaker Lake (in Cleveland where my family is from) to Rockaway Beach (where my sister-in-law grew up) to the '64 Worlds Fair (they really DID meet Robert Kennedy there), all the way to an autumnal country lane... somewhere in New England let's say." Marc Cohn on Facebook
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