With This Ring

Album: It's About Time (2003)
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Songfacts®:

  • In this R&B jam, Kenny Loggins uses a wedding band as a symbol of a lifelong commitment to his second wife, Julia. Even though they'd been married for several years and Julia wore a ring, Loggins refused to wear one because he thought it represented a loss of freedom. Eventually, he had a change of heart and bought himself a wedding band as a birthday present for Julia. Then he wrote the song. "Twelve years of a solid love relationship healed that part of me that was scared of having a symbol of imprisonment," he explained in a 2003 interview with The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.
  • Not long after the album's release, Loggins was shocked when Julia announced she wanted a divorce, which was finalized in 2004. "I got pretty blindsided by Julia's decision to leave," he told The Las Vegas Sun in 2009. "She's a very impulsive woman, and she found herself going through a midlife crisis. And she didn't know what to make of it, and it changed her life."
  • Loggins was previously married to Eva Ein from 1978 to 1990, during which time he wrote love songs like "Whenever I Call You "Friend"" and "Forever," but he claims the emotion behind them wasn't really love. "I wrote the earlier love songs without knowing what love was all about," he told The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. "Julia is my first real love. She is definitely the love of my life."
  • He and Julia co-authored the 1997 book The Unimaginable Life, which was touted as "a verbal expression of this profound spiritual warmth - a book essential for anyone who wants to have love and make it last." It coincided with Loggins' album of the same name.
  • Loggins wrote this with fellow soft-rock veteran Richard Marx, who also co-wrote several other tracks on the album, including "The One That Got Away."

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