For most of my life, songwriting has been a kind of journaling.
Something happens. I feel something strongly enough that it needs somewhere to go. Eventually I pick up a guitar and try to turn it into words and chords.
It doesn't necessarily make the feeling go away.
But it gives it shape.
And once something has shape, I can usually understand it a little better.
That system worked remarkably well for a very long time.
There was, however, a fairly obvious design flaw that I hadn't really considered.
People listen to songs.
The problem with a journal that has chords
Like most marriages that have lasted long enough to acquire a history, ours went through a difficult time.
There was hurt. There were things to work through. And eventually there was a decision, on both sides, to keep working through them together.
That created an unusual problem for me as a songwriter.
In the past, I had often written about hurt from the other side of it. A relationship had ended. A decision had been made. Life had moved on.
The song could look backwards.
This time I hadn't moved on.
I had stayed.
So had Jacqui.
And we were trying to build forwards.
Suddenly my usual method of dealing with difficult emotions didn't feel quite so harmless.
A private journal can contain anything.
You can be angry. Unfair. Contradictory. You can write something at two in the morning that you don't even believe by breakfast.
Then you close the book.
A song is different.
A song has a nasty habit of wanting to be sung.
And if you're trying to rebuild something with the person you're writing about, complete emotional honesty becomes rather more complicated.
What exactly was I supposed to do with the song afterwards?
Play it to her?
Play it to somebody else?
Stand up at a braai with a guitar and announce that I've got a new one?
There are probably easier ways to ruin an otherwise pleasant Saturday afternoon.
So I didn't write it.
Or perhaps more accurately, I couldn't.
The songs were still there.
I just wasn't giving them a voice.
Mom interferes
Years passed.
Then Mom turned eighty.
Somewhere in the planning for her birthday, it became apparent to me that I was going to have to write her a song.
Nobody actually told me this.
I simply knew.
This was inconvenient, because by then I'd become extremely good at explaining why I wasn't writing songs.
I was busy.
There was work.
There was life.
I hadn't written properly in years.
And somewhere underneath all of that was another, rather more persistent thought:
Perhaps I simply wasn't very good at it anyway.
But Mom had spent most of my life being convinced otherwise, and turning eighty apparently gave her considerable leverage.
So I started writing again.
At almost exactly the same time, I had access to tools that hadn't existed the last time I'd seriously wrestled with songwriting.
AI became a strange sort of talking notebook — somewhere I could throw ideas around, argue with myself, test what I was actually trying to say.
And Suno allowed me to hear songs outside myself.
Not just Warren with a guitar.
A song.
That distinction turned out to matter.
What was I actually trying to say?
By then there was distance between me and the hurt that had made this particular song so difficult to write.
And distance does interesting things.
It doesn't necessarily change what happened.
Sometimes it changes what you can see.
For years I'd been stuck on the painful part of the story.
Now, looking back, something else seemed considerably more interesting.
We were still here.
Not because nothing difficult had happened.
Not because either of us was perfect.
Not because we'd somehow managed to preserve the immaculate fairytale version of love we'd started with.
We were still here because, somewhere along the way, we had continued choosing to be.
And I started thinking about the word choose.
When you're young and newly in love, choosing someone feels enormous.
Everything is new. They're fascinating. They're beautiful. You haven't yet discovered all the things they do that will eventually drive you completely insane.
You're also presenting a reasonably well-maintained version of yourself.
Everybody is on their best behaviour.
Choosing each other under those circumstances is lovely.
I'm just not sure anymore that it's the difficult choice.
There is something rather more convincing about choosing somebody when the mystery is gone.
When you've seen the bad moods and the mistakes.
When you've disappointed one another.
When you've watched each other fail.
When you've seen illness and exhaustion and ageing and all the ordinary indignities that don't make it into love songs.
When you've woken up beside the same person for twenty years and seen them exactly as God created them.
Raccoon eyes.
Cellulite.
The lot.
And you look over and think:
Yep. You.
That was the song.
“That's very sad.”
When I'd finished I Still Choose You, the first person I played it for was Jacqui.
She had to be.
In truth, her reaction would probably determine whether anybody else ever heard it.
She listened.
Then she said:
“That's very sad.”
That wasn't quite what I'd been hoping for.
And I knew what she meant.
To her, the song sounded as though something wonderful had been lost.
Love had once been this effortless, romantic thing and now, after everything life had thrown at it, I'd reduced it to a daily decision.
I still choose you.
Almost:
Well, I'm still here.
I very nearly threw the song away.
Perhaps she was right.
Perhaps I'd written something sad without realising it.
So I sat with it for a while.
And eventually I realised something.
Jacqui knew too much.
The footnotes
She couldn't hear I Still Choose You without hearing everything behind it.
She knew the history.
She knew where particular feelings had come from.
She knew all the footnotes that weren't actually in the song.
Another listener doesn't.
Someone else hears the song and brings their own history to it.
Someone who has loved another person for twenty or thirty or forty years knows something about choosing that person that the newlywed simply cannot know yet.
They know what it means to wake up one morning and not particularly like each other.
They know arguments that seemed enormously important and, ten years later, neither of them can remember what they were about.
They know grief and money and children and work and disappointment and getting older.
They know that sometimes love is fireworks.
And sometimes love is making coffee.
Sometimes it is holding hands.
Sometimes it is sitting silently in the same room.
And sometimes it is simply waking up, looking at the person beside you with the benefit of all the evidence you've accumulated over the years, and saying:
Yes. Still you.
Suddenly I didn't think the song was sad at all.
The song knew before I did
Something else happened while I was writing it.
I felt closer to Jacqui through that song than I had in years.
Perhaps ever.
That surprised me.
I'd spent so long avoiding some of these songs because I thought writing them would make me feel the hurt again.
Instead, the distance had allowed me to see something the hurt had obscured.
The remarkable part of the story wasn't what had happened to the marriage.
The remarkable part was the marriage.
It was still here.
So were we.
And writing the song did what songwriting had always done for me.
It took something complicated and emotionally untidy and forced me to look at it until I could find the thing I actually wanted to say.
Apparently I hadn't stopped needing that.
I'd just stopped allowing myself to do it.
What comes after
I think I once believed the great declaration of love was choosing somebody when everything about them was new and wonderful.
I'm not so sure anymore.
At the beginning, you choose the person you think they are and the life you imagine you'll have together.
Years later, you get to make the choice again.
Except now you know them.
And they know you.
You've seen the best of each other.
You've also seen the bits nobody puts in the wedding photographs.
You know the person lying beside you isn't perfect.
Neither are you.
The mystery is largely gone.
The evidence is in.
And perhaps that's what I've come to believe love really is.
Not the fairytale.
What comes after.
It's waking up beside the person you've woken up beside for the last twenty years, seeing the whole of them, and thinking:
Yep. You.
I still choose you.