Songwriting: Can You Love Me?

One boring day in our old Brooklyn apartment, I felt sad as I sat at the piano. Sad about all the things I felt I’d lost in my Christianity that used to make praying easier and believing simpler and “feeling” like God loved me normal.
Now I’m this doubting, cursing, drinking, gay-affirming, progressively theological, exvangelical. I mean, I’m closer to being a Catholic or an Episcopalian or a Lutheran than I am to any other denomination. (Although, let’s face it, my gospel-loving, charismatic worship, tongues-speaking, God’s-voice-hearing roots run deep and I still utilize those precious pieces of my non-denominational upbringing so maybe that will comfort someone who once knew me somewhere.)

So, I started singing a prayer that turned into a line in the first verse of Can You Love Me: “Sometimes I wonder if I should be different / if You loved me more before I changed.” I was singing it to God. It was a question I wanted to be answered with a certain feeling. I guess I wanted to know that God could still accept me even though so much of me was different now. I did everything right back in my worship-leader, youth-leader, full-time ministry days. Of course God loved me. I believed every word in the Bible and I tithed and I was at church more than I was anywhere else. But when all of that shifts over time, confidence in God’s said-love does too.

There was also the raging dumpster fire of politics that was going on then too. Vaccines, January 6, coming off of wild 2020, a “stolen election”, BLM protests, all of which almost (or did) fracture(d) relationships with my family and friends. It was leaving the church I grew up in years prior and later taking a stand against behaviors of leaders there which hurt people I love, which caused complete radio silence from those used-to-be-dear friends who still went to that church, who attended our wedding, who prayed for my sick family members for decades…whose very gifts still sit in my kitchen cabinets. It was the facebook comment-wars and random messages of shame I would receive from older ladies who used to pray for me before and after Sunday service. It was the boundaries I put in place when old relationships entered my life again, which upset and hurt people who wanted me to act differently. It was the decisions I make in my day to day life, to live in NYC, to be a recording artist, and to be a teacher— to the disappointment of so many who wanted me to stay “ in the ministry”.

The second verse asks that, if those people could be different and know how painful my journey (and the journey of others’) has been, then maybe it would be easier to feel love and acceptance for who I am now. It hurts me to disappoint people. And I sometimes still feel shame for it, after all these years. But if I could rip the front side me open and those people saw where I’ve been, come from, what I’ve seen, etc— then maybe I would make sense to them and they could make room for me. It’s amazing to think of the countless people all over this globe who feel the same way, for a myriad of reasons.

I cannot un-change. Who I was isn’t here anymore, I’ve kept with me only the beautiful, precious memories and tenets and pillars in my life that still serve me today. I used the term “lost at sea” to denote this reality in the pre-chorus, but also to wink and nod at my other single, “You Are Ocean”, since the metaphor there is that I am actually found by God though I feel unreachable by others who can’t receive me as I am now.

This song is to God, to my family, to friends who are no longer in my life or who tried to re-enter again, to those who are unhappy and disappointed with who I am now and dissatisfied with how I turned out. A guiding question wrote this song in a matter of hours and became the title: Can you love me anymore?

If you’ve heard it, the bridge carries us all to another space and time with the fantastic choir of friends who piled into the studio to sing their hearts out and beg the question, echoing my pain that I literally WAIL into the microphone amidst shredding guitars, banging piano, and crashing drums. When I recorded that bridge live with all those sounds behind me, I had chills all over my body. I wanted to cry but I screamed the melody instead. It was all the pain and worry and shame and struggle of changing longing for love and acceptance, leaving my body and going out into the world, through the sound waves, and onto the final recording. I finished two of these takes and was shaking, tears in my eyes when it was all over. Music can really heal, or at least for me, it started the process.

I pray to God that those who have been in a similar place of pain can connect with this song in a way that brings healing closer, brings God closer, brings the family and friends who matter, closer. In the end, I think all any of us want is love. And often, that love must look and feel like acceptance.