Electric Relaxation: "I Believe" by Blessid Union of Souls

This has always been one of my favorite songs and after I read the wikipedia entry on it, it made me love it more. First, I'm a sucker for piano music and for a song driven by it, it's soft but it has a force that overwhelms you.

I love the structure of it and it just hit me how this is just great writing about love. The first verse is 3rd person telling someone to trust their heart involving the writer's feelings and take a chance. The second takes the theme to a universal level, touching on homelessness, drug abuse, violence. And the third just sees the writer bare their soul about being denied a relationship because he's Black and hoping her father sees him as a human.

It's great writing because Eliot Sloan turns the spotlight from his love interest to the world at large and then back to himself. And then his voice just glides over the piano with the right amount of pain and emotion to convey his passion without sounding sappy.

I tried to learn this song on the piano by ear and it's a dream of mine to play it. It's beautiful and it's timeless in my opinion. I actually tried to learn the melody of the verses but it's tough. I'd rather listen and just love it.

Great songs draw the listener in by shared experience. I learned in an English class that the best writers appealed to universal themes by drawing upon incidents in their own life. My favorite writer James Baldwin did this to perfection. This song does this too.