Inspirations: And I Love You
Load the car and write the note
Grab your bag and grab your coat
Tell the ones that need to know
We are headed north
One foot in and one foot back
But it don't pay to live like that
So I cut the ties and I jumped the tracks
For never to return
Oh, Brooklyn, Brooklyn, take me in
Are you aware the shape I'm in?
My hands, they shake, my head, it spins
Oh, Brooklyn, Brooklyn, take me in
When at first I learned to speak
I used all my words to fight
With him and her and you and me
Ah, but it's just a waste of time
Yeah, it's such a waste of time
That woman, she's got eyes that shine
Like a pair of stolen polished dimes
She asked to dance, I said, "It's fine
I'll see you in the morning time"
Oh, Brooklyn, Brooklyn, take me in
Are you aware the shape I'm in?
My hands, they shake, my head, it spins
Oh, Brooklyn, Brooklyn, take me in
Three words that became hard to say
I, and love, and you
What you were then, I am today
Look at the things I do
Oh, Brooklyn, Brooklyn, take me in
Are you aware the shape I'm in?
My hands, they shake, my head, it spins
Oh, Brooklyn, Brooklyn, take me in
Brooklyn, Brooklyn, take me in
Are you aware the shape I'm in
My hands, they shake, my head, it spins, spins
Whoa, Brooklyn, Brooklyn, take me in
Dumbed down and numbed by time and age
Your dreams they catch, the world, the cage
The highway sets the traveler's stage
All exits look the same
Three words that became hard to say
I, and love, and you
I, and love, and you
I, and love, and you
Source: Musixmatch
Songwriters: Robert William Crawford / Scott Yancey Avett / Timothy Seth Avett
I and Love and You (Live At PNC Arena, North Carolina) lyrics © Nemoivmusic, Ramseur Family Fold Music, Truth Comes True Publishing, First Big Snow Publishing
These lyrics feel like a journal folded into music. The urgency of the opening lines—load the car, write the note, grab your bag—speaks to that restless, bodily need to escape, to move, to leave what no longer fits. I recognize that impulse in myself. There were times when movement was salvation, when staying put felt like drowning, when the geography of my life had to be rewritten with every step I could take. One foot in and one foot back—that hesitation is familiar, the invisible tether that keeps us anchored even when everything in us wants flight.
Brooklyn becomes more than a city. It is witness, confessor, guardian. “Oh, Brooklyn, take me in”—the repetition reads like a prayer whispered into the streets, into brick and asphalt and the ghosts of lives passing by. It is a city that sees your tremors, your spinning head, the shape you are in, and offers no judgment, only presence. That is intimacy in its rawest form. I have known spaces like that in my life: rooms, studios, highways, neighborhoods, where simply being seen without censure felt like reclamation.
The lyric “When at first I learned to speak, I used all my words to fight” resonates as confession. The early self, armored with rhetoric and argument, using words like weapons because there was no other way to survive. I recognize that girl in the mirror, that body that first learned pain through language, that mouth that had to shout to be heard. Yet the song notes it as waste. Time and energy spent battling, resisting, railing—yes, but also marking the edges of who we are. Those fights left scars and wisdom alike.
The repeated invocation of “I, and love, and you” is a small miracle. Three words, stripped to bare necessity, suddenly impossible. I understand the weight in them: to say them requires vulnerability, memory, reckoning. That phrase carries years of longing, fear, and practice, like a hand extended across time to touch the person you used to be and the person you are trying to become. Saying those words is an act of courage, a claim on the life you refuse to allow to slip into silence.
The last verses—dumbed down, numbed by time and age, dreams caught in the cage of the world—carry the ache of hindsight. I know it intimately. Life carves out small prisons in the body, in the mind, in the map of one’s days. The highway sets the traveler’s stage, all exits looking the same. That sense of sameness, of choice that feels illusory, is the rhythm of many years. Yet the song never leaves the traveler entirely alone. Brooklyn, the city, the place, the metaphor, remains open. It receives, it witnesses, it takes in the shape you are in.
Listening to this now, I think of movement as both literal and psychic. Flight and return. Leaving and claiming. The song holds the contradiction of wanting escape while seeking sanctuary. It reminds me that even in trembling hands and spinning heads, even when words fail and fights exhaust, there is space to arrive, to be seen, and to name love when it finally can be said.
