"With You" | Celebrating Love in all its inspirations
Cover photo by Tim Marshall.
My soul has loved and found Love in this song since I was a little girl. My oldest sister always played the best music, and this is the furthest from an exception to that that you can get. I have been obsessed with love in some form or another since I was a child. It’s in-built into me. Literally. My life’s work is essentially to help us love and embrace who we are in ourselves, and so better receive, respect, and love one another.
I came back across “With You” several months ago in an IG montage of the most memorable songs from the 90’s. And when I heard it again—for the first time in about 30 years (wow, I’m old enough to say that, lolollll), my soul remembered how much we love it.
How could we not? Tony Terry is singing us up into the heavens with this soul-deep ode to experiencing co-creating love with another person—where the experience of love compels us into greater love and living beyond our self. That’s the exactly the love I’m looking for, you dig?
As I’ve moved through the past few months and become better aligned with my soul question of “Who are your people?” this song kept resonating through my being. Which may seem odd because it’s billed as a romantic love song, and what does that have to do with understanding who our closest and most beloved friends, family, colleagues, and supporters are?
One simple answer is what my sister Naomi once said: Because God is Love, every love song is actually and inherently about the love that we’re seeking with and from God. And so seeking within and from our Selves. And so seeking with one another.
Which also just makes sense, because many romantic “love” songs are super creepy, in how co-dependent and unhealthy they are. My shower singer self loves romantic love songs. Generally, not that healthy.[1]
The comments on the YouTube video are filled with folks expressing how this song is so evocative of the experience of being loved and inspired to love. And that’s not surprising when we hear the backstory—how Love led to Love leads to Love.
As it goes,[2] Minister Terry, himself moved by the depth of love expressed in “With You,” fought his record label to release it as his next single. They felt it was “too corny.”[3] But for Tony, it was powerful, because it was genuine.[4]
And his soul proved true, as souls tend to do.
Anita Baker was so moved by Terry’s performance of the song that she called up Terry—whom she hadn’t previously met—to ask why there wasn’t a video. When she found out it was because there was no record label budget or promotion behind it—nor would they be, because the label refused to back the song—she paid for the video herself, and tapped Blair Underwood to direct it.[5]
Like Terry, Baker believed the beauty and power in this song—and in Terry himself—to be far too much a gift for the world to let its life rest on record executives’ mentalities about what they thought should be popular, or how much money it might make. According to Terry, she later attested she was “just listening to the Spirit.”
I experience that same beauty and power Auntie Anita did every time I hear this song.
The invitations I receive in listening to this song are to imagine and hold in my nascent response with “Who are our people?”:
Who are the people and what are the experiences that make us “hear a song” and want to live lives that “sing love” with them, in ourselves, and with one another?
How can we savor and celebrate how these people and experiences inspire and cultivate lightheartedness within ourselves?[6]
How are we inspired to co-create love beyond ourselves because of these experiences of deep, genuine belovedness?
So it’s fitting to share this in February, the month of Love. Beyond Valentine’s Day, one single day to celebrate one type of relationship, February is also the onset of Pisces season, the cosmic season of Compassion.
To celebrate the energies that influence us to ground in and co-create in all forms of Love, I’ll be sharing over the next several weeks stories of the lovely and wonderful folks who, in being practitioners of deep and amazing love, have most inspired and empowered me to accept and love myself, and love one another more fully.
Here’s to the myriad full, deep, complex manifestations of Love—and to the people who, in their being, presence, and living invite and inspire us to learn, embody, and live it our Selves.
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[1] We’ll talk another time about how, of the 9 or 11-some types of love in ancient Greek tradition…romantic love isn’t one of them. We made it up a little while ago. In short, it’s not that it’s “not real” so much as how we conceptualize it in US Western society is a bastardization and collapse of healthy balance to various loving relationships we do experience—and need—for fulfillment. Another conversation, another time.
[2] You can read Tony Terry’s full account here. It’s magical!
[3] I’ve witnessed love songs are often considered “corny” when they are genuine, because so many of us are afraid to believe in genuine Love, which in desire drives and builds off its energies of passion as a catalyst to generate more of itself. We societally seem to settle for unhealthy practices of, “We felt feelings of love, and just let them run and drain until they weren’t any longer.”
Ironically for the record label’s fear of “corniness,” “With You” is literally about love not for the sake of itself, but Love which grows the Love in us. That’s not corny. That’s WTF Love is supposed to do…
[4] How Anita Baker helped Tony Terry make "With You" a global hit - YouTube
[5] Underwood makes a hilariously self-deprecating cameo at 3:02.
[6] Many thanks to Rev. Dr. Kirk Byron Jones for this framing in lightheartedness <3