Proposal

the brief

originally a folkish song of regret, hope and deep emotional realization around the channel's first marriage; transformed into an orchestral delight in its 2.0 version

A second song started that Christmas Day back in 1988. But like Transformation, this song had actually started earlier, much earlier.

For years I'd had this little bit of almost a country and western verse running about my head:

I've been a traveling man,
girl you know I've been around.
Working up in the Arctic,
laying pipe out in the Peace,
and sending the money home to my wife and child.

It was a wierd bit of doggerel, a mind worm that would pop its head out every now and then with a cheerful “Remember me? I'm still here!” I would try to play it on the guitar now and then but nothing gelled.

I never expected that it would turn into a full-on song, rhyming lines and all. But it did. And it turned out to be about my first wife Leanne (who was in Australia with our daughters that Christmas to see her terminally ill father for the last time.)

Those lines in fact were the first verse of a song called Proposal. Unlike Transformation, which told a very mythic story, Proposal told a very personal (albeit factually inaccurate) story, about coming to see how I'd short-changed my marriage to Leanne.

God it seems so long ago now
we were young we did not know
how the years would stain the birch
kitchen set your mom gave us.

How the tears would tear the lie
I whispered in that sunlit church.
How the lie would grow so huge
and drive me to a safe refuge.

Behind that emotional recognition was another, even far more powerful.

Very long story not told here, Leanne is Australian and we had met in Beijing. An Australian psychic had predicted our meeting to Leanne with a number of specific details and 'coincidences' that defied easy brushing off. He had further told her that we would meet 'no matter what happens in your life" and that I had to go to Australia.

So we understood from early on that our lives had placed us together for some purpose. We didn't know what that purpose was, and our early years as a couple and then parents were a financial and emotional struggle. We were young, we knew little about being married, being parents. We almost foundered more than once.

My 'self' was a big part of the difficulty. Emotionally distant. Self-absorbed. Angry at the world, at our financial stress. With little self-awareness. It scarred our marriage even long after the meditation's self-awareness lessons had begun to change me.

Proposal took a jack hammer to all that crusted inner shit. The lyrics and chording came within a few weeks. Each line was an emotional earthquake, a forceful 'look at this' that culminated with a vision of our deeper selves as karma partners linked by purpose, and a sense of deep emotional bonding, love beyond anything I'd ever thought possible.

Waking in that moonlit room
6:21 on Christmas morn
A feeling came from out the blue
Hit me hard, I might lose you.

Hit me hard but broke the lock
Burst through all this barren rock
Tore to my core and blew away
that tired chore.

Proposal was the next-to-last of the all-original karosongs to be reversioned, in part because the spokesong version initially seemed to fit with more than one Yanni track, including a live version of Nostalgia.

Long story short, Nostalgia won out as the asynchronous track because it's own structure of building to an orchestral climax almost perfectly tracked the structure and emotions of the original lyrics.

I want to be your snow white dove
sailing in that perfect love.
I want to be your joy without sorrow
I want to be your new tomorrow.

I want to be your new bridegroom,
so this song I sing to you.
Hear me now from out the true
I really do I do love you.

In fact, all that was needed to create the song's 2.0 version were a few lyric tweaks and a bit of spacing out the verses of the spokesong version. The song remained the same . . . but so different married to Yanni's beautiful music.

And now the last few lines — the song's emotional climax emerging from the dying reverberations of the orchestra's climax — had the power I could not manage in the 1.0 version.

If you're feeling the love I can feel
If you're feeling the love we can share
if you're feeling the love we can be

Will you marry me,
this time for real?

Post-script

Leanne did not respond favourably to Proposal or the songs in general on her return from visiting her dying father. She had not experienced that love I had felt in the grip of the song coming forward and the scars from our earlier years remained. We separated four years later. We remain friendly.

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