Gravitate

Song story & origins

Introduction

The title track from my 2018 album, Gravitate, began as a love song for my wife, Sheryl, but grew into something much larger. It became not just a personal piece but a wider statement about connection, community, and survival in a time when the world itself felt like it was fraying.

Where the song came from

The song opens with a shock: “I won’t love you tomorrow.” It sounds like a break-up line, but the next words—“the same as today”—reverse the meaning. Tomorrow’s love will not be the same because it will have grown. That turn gives the song its power, and for me it reflected the state of my own marriage. At the time I had been married to Sheryl for thirty-two years, and it mattered to me that our love wasn’t stagnant. Love can’t stay still; it has to keep expanding, keep becoming more. It would be heartbreaking to think we had already reached our fullest expression of love. The song insists that there is always more to discover in each other.

But Gravitate also came out of its moment. In 2018, the atmosphere was heavy with division. The news was full of shootings, arguments about race and immigration, and a general sense of people pulling apart. Writing in that climate, the song became more than a personal love song. It became an album centerpiece about relationships and communities, about finding our way back toward each other when everything seems designed to split us.

What the song is saying

At its heart, Gravitate uses the language of physics to talk about love. Gravity pulls stars and planets into orbits they cannot escape, and love does the same for people. Even when we are spinning out toward the edge, the center holds us. That truth repeats like a mantra: “We must gravitate.”

Some of the imagery came directly from my fascination with science. In quantum physics, entangled particles remain connected even across vast distances. That picture of entanglement felt exactly right for love, for friendship, for community. It’s why the lyric says, “Particles this entangled don’t notice the space.” Distance doesn’t undo what has already bound us.

Another line—“these hearts we have wrangled together in grace”—comes from cowboy imagery. Wrangling is the dusty work of bringing cattle into line, and in love there is a parallel. Hearts don’t always align easily. It takes effort, sometimes struggle, but when it’s done in grace it brings them together.

Perhaps the most important reflection comes in the line “every center is out on the edge of some other.” It reminds me that no matter how central I feel in my own story, I am always on someone else’s margin. That’s not a diminishment but an invitation. The edge of my life is the center of another’s, and that realization changes how I look at those who feel cast aside.

These ideas connect to wisdom I’ve heard in Lakota tradition—the phrase Mitákuye Oyás’iŋ, meaning “all my relatives.” It’s a teaching that everything is connected, and it dovetails with the scientific truth that we are made of stardust. The iron in our blood, the oxygen in our breath, the carbon in our bones, all forged in dying stars. Whether through tradition or science, the message is the same: we belong to one another. To not come together is to wither. To gravitate is to survive.

Music and arrangement

Musically, Gravitate is built on the acoustic guitar but expanded by textures that make it feel larger. I layered in strings using Apple’s “smart strings” feature, which generated flowing harmonic lines around my chords. It felt like a sonic picture of gravity itself, pulling the song together.

The mandolin became the song’s solo voice. Its brightness fit the mood, like a star cutting through a dark sky. I loved how it carried both delicacy and strength. For a while I also had a tenor banjo part worked up. It was playful and interesting, but when I listened with a friend, they pointed out that it lightened the song too much. The themes were heavy, and the banjo tilted it toward something it wasn’t. In the end I let it go, and the balance of guitar, strings, and mandolin felt exactly right—intimate, yet expansive enough to hold the weight of the lyrics.

Why it stays with me

Gravitate has become one of those songs that keeps echoing back to me, long after it was written. It still holds the intimacy of a love song to Sheryl, but it also keeps reminding me of something bigger. It says that even when we are full of sorrow for what we’ve lost, even when we feel the nostalgia of “yesterdays,” we are still bound together by something deeper.

The song ends not with uncertainty but with insistence. We must gravitate. It’s not just an option—it’s our nature. Love changes us, it pulls us, it draws us toward each other, and without it we don’t survive. To not come together is to die. To gravitate is to live.

Source: New Music Memoir (1).docx