Ottawa’s musical couples share ‘their’ love songs
Couples recall the soundtrack of their romantic lives together
What’s your song ?
That’s the question we posed to nine musically savvy couples from the Ottawa area. The answers ranged from Mighty Mike and Hall & Oates to Duke Ellington and George Gershwin, with each one not only giving a glimpse of the relationship, but also revealing the power of music.
“One of the beautiful things about being a musician and having music in your life,” says Alexander Shelley, the British-born musical director and conductor of the NAC Orchestra, “is that a piece can immediately bring me back to that moment when we met, and that period of time when we first formed a bond.”
For Alexander and his wife, Zoe Shelley, the piece that brings them back to their first meeting is Sibelius’ grand, romantic Second Symphony. It’s what was in front of them, more than a decade ago, when he conducted the National Youth Orchestra of Britain and she was a teenage cellist. (A chemistry grad, Zoe is now a personal trainer and fitness model who was an extra in last year’s Wonder Woman movie.)
However, with a 45-minute running time, they decide the symphony is too long to count as a song.
During a recent interview at their downtown condo, the couple debates between two classic pop songs: First up is Stevie Wonder’s endlessly romantic As, from his seminal 1976 album, Songs In the Key of Life. The tune was featured when they were married on July 30, 2011, in London.
“There’s that sort of eternal element in Stevie’s text in that song,” Alexander says. “And I think those are the things that draw us, simple togetherness. We don’t need any more than that, even though we’re blessed to have a lot in our lives that’s great. But if we reduce it down, we just need one another.”
Also under consideration is Just The Two of Us, the 1981 R & B classic written by Bill Withers, William Salter and Ralph MacDonald, and performed by Grover Washington and Withers. Zoe votes for it because it’s one of the pieces that led her to fall in love with him.
“That was one of the ways he wooed me,” she recalls. “We’d go out for dinner, come back after dinner, have a glass of wine, sit and play the piano. He played a lot of these standard songs. That was one. He played it a lot and I loved it. It just became a very special part of our life.”
Both songs express a similar sentiment of eternal love, and in the end, Alexander defers to Zoe’s choice.
“I think one of the things we always come back to as a couple are the simple things. Whatever were to happen in life, we just need a box under a bridge and to be together and we would be happy,” he says.
“As long as it’s the two of us together, we’ll be fine.”