D'Arline

Album: The Civil Wars (2013)
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Songfacts®:

  • Joy Williams and John Paul White of The Civil Wars wrote this song in the studio behind Williams' Nashville house on a warm summer day with the windows and doors open. She explained that it "is a sweet lament, of loss and the belief that you'll never be able to love anybody else again."
  • The song was inspired by one of the Letters of Note, which Williams found on Twitter. She explained: "(I) was struck by the title of a letter written by a famous physicist named Richard Feynman: 'I love my wife. My wife is dead.' A little over a year after her death, he wrote his wife a love letter and sealed it. It was written in 1946, and wasn't opened until after his death in 1988. He ended his note to his long-lost wife with 'Please excuse my not mailing this - but I don't know your new address.'"
  • When Williams and White were recording the song together, they could hear crows cawing in the background which Williams named Edgar, Allen and Poe. She said: "This recording and performance of the song is the first and only in existence, a work tape recorded simply on my iPhone."

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