Dear Friends, Here's the second installment in a series of new videos. I hope you enjoy, and please share!
Love songs don’t come easily to my pen. I have been a university lecturer in my past life, and I can still expound upon a great number of things, offer points of view and insights and interpretations, and perhaps even sound rational some of the time. But when it comes to love: that immeasurably vast subject, that unquantifiable force by and through which the most extraordinary things become possible – most of the time, I feel as though I’m still back in primary school.
Yet one day it came to me – driving around in my old ute, looking at the blue and white patches that make up the vast Tantawangalo sky – that all my life I’ve been closing doors and windows that ought to be left open. That I’ve been trying to catalogue, categorise, stake out a claim, when it comes to love. And has this worked? Definitely not. It has always brought me down, sooner or later.
Someone told me once that craziness can be defined this way: that you continue to do the same things over and over again, while at the same time you expect that there are going to be different results. Fortunately for us, new and different choices have a way of calling out to us from time to time, of making themselves so obvious that we can’t miss them. I see this as a form of grace, or mercy. And that’s what happened on the particular day that Rise In Love came into being.
So my thanks go out to the skies above, and to that moment of breakthrough, for the message that I received. And in this sense, Rise In Love is a song of gratitude, pure and simple.
Rise in Love is a song from Michael Menager's acclaimed new album featuring guests Jim Keltner, Matt Nightingale & Aaron Embry, produced by Heath Cullen. Hear more: www.michaelmenager.com
‘With more than a whiff of Dylan and Ramblin Jack Elliott, Menager’s songs are rich with characters, wry observations and wit… The more you delve into Not the Express, the more you will be delighted.' - Rhythms Magazine
"Menager sings of roads travelled and life lived, and he's warm and funny and wise, his songs delivered with youthful vigour" - Sydney Morning Herald