More Than A Love Song

On James Taylor’s “You Can Close Your Eyes”

I recently read an article in The New York Times entitled “My Deathbed Playlist (And Yours)” by Mark Vanhoenacker, and I realized the first song on my own deathbed playlist would have to be James Taylor’s “You Can Close Your Eyes,” a song released in 1971 on his Mud Slide Slim and the Blue Horizon album. It’s a love song but something more than a love song too, with simple lyrics:

Well the sun is surely sinking down
But the moon is slowly rising
And this old world must still be spinning ‘round
And I still love you

So close your eyes
You can close your eyes, it’s all right
I don’t know no love songs
And I can’t sing the blues anymore
But I can sing this song
And you can sing this song
When I’m gone

Well it won’t be long before another day
We’re gonna have a good time
And no one’s gonna take that time away
You can stay as long as you like

So close your eyes
You can close your eyes, it’s all right
I don’t know no love songs
And I can’t sing the blues anymore
But I can sing this song
And you can sing this song
When I’m gone

Taylor says he doesn’t know any love songs, and yet this is most definitely a love song, one of his best. And I love this love song because it shows love as something more, something bigger than just two people. It is a love at its most heartwrenching, when it is mixed with goodbyes. The song expresses that deep comfort we all seek in love, the assurance that though things may die, there is always new life, new birth, perhaps even the final comfort of eternal celebration and community. It promises us that though we must someday say goodbye to all the people we love, there is a feast day that goes on and on, and the party never ends.

I lost my father this past July. He passed away by complications of a triple by-pass, open heart surgery. My father loved music, Frank Sinatra, opera, Diana Krall, Julie London, Eartha Kit. When he died, I found among the CDs in his car, one Little Anthony and the Imperials CD and one collection of the Drifters; a CD called Trio, with Dolly Parton, Linda Ronstadt, and Emmylou Harris; four Diana Krall CDs; The Best of Kenny Rogers, one Barbara Streisand and one Tony Bennet. He liked country and he liked RB/Soul, but he loved jazz, a taste he picked up along with soul food while he was working in Harlem. He said he liked classical as well, but I don’t remember him ever listening to it. The music of my generation never really grabbed him, except Billy Joel, whom he loved not only because he was a good old-fashioned songwriter, but also because he sung so lovingly of his New York. As my father lay on his deathbed, I plugged in my phone and played music that I thought he might like. He was unconscious, so I don’t know if he liked it or if I was driving him crazy. He didn’t make his deathbed playlist, so I had to improvise. I hope it comforted him. I know it comforted me, my sister Charlotte, and his friends Jeff and Vicki, who were all there.

Love is so tied up with loss. Our lives are precious because they end, and our love pierces us most at the ending. Taylor’s song begins at sunset, but the sunset is a moonrise, part of a greater and older cycle of nature; that’s the comfort, that’s why we can close our eyes, relax, and accept such loss. The refrain of the song, the way it comes back around, in cyclical fashion, to its title line of comfort — the suggestion that it’s okay, “you can close your eyes” — borrows some of its comfort from those greater, natural cycles. And true to those cycles, the second verse points to a future sunrise: “It won’t be long before another day,” he sings. But the return he imagines after he dies is at once bigger and more inclusive than just he and his lover:

We’re gonna have a good time
And no one’s gonna take that time away
You can stay as long as you like

Taylor imagines here a party that never ends, that can never be taken away, that is promised to all of us, one from which we never have to depart. This heavenly comfort of a community in song is part of many of Taylor’s gospel-inspired tunes, from “Little David” to “Shed a Little Light.”

Taylor says that love endures the changes; despite the days passing and the changing seasons, he “still love(s)” his girl. And yet he sings of a day to come, “when I’m gone.” Love will not endure his death, and yet it will live on in his music; after his death, his girl can find his love in his song. And that will be her comfort. We find comfort in music — even when we are out of music. Taylor writes this song, it appears, from a place where there doesn’t seem to be music left, someplace beyond “the blues,” where he can remember “no love songs” and yet from that dreadful place without the comfort of music, one finds a song, “this song,” the one he is singing now. When someone dies, one of our best comforts is in song, for “I can sing,” and “You can sing.” We can sing in memory of the ones we love, and when we sing together, we are comforted by and in one another. It is that common song that makes “You Can Close Your Eyes,” more than a love song, a song that links our love for our lovers to our love for our community and world.

That in the end is why I chose James Taylor’s “You Can Close Your Eyes” for number one on my Deathbed Playlist. I don’t know how and when I am going to die, but I want it played. It would be a comfort to me, to hear Taylor’s familiar voice telling me “It’s all right,” that I can close my eyes. It would be a comfort to my wife and my son, who have heard me play it ’til I am blue in the face. It will remind them that “when I’m gone” they can still sing a song, still celebrate life, and it will hold out the hope that someday we may even see one another again. Even if we don’t, the words remind us that the great cycles of life and death are enough, that when we sing songs, we match ourselves to the music of the spheres, and that our love songs are more than love songs.