The Avett Brothers / I and Love and You / 2009
I and Love and You
anxious, wistful, searching for steadiness
A departure song built around a literal move north, 'I and Love and You' uses the city of Brooklyn as a confessor to confront what leaving home has cost the narrator emotionally. Underneath the travel narrative is a quieter story about losing the ability to say simple, sincere things after years of using language as a weapon.
displacement and relocation emotional vulnerability language failing intimacy self-examination inherited patterns
Who's speaking
A first-person narrator addressing a city (Brooklyn) as if it were a person who could grant refuge; the address is a device for self-address, making the song feel like an internal confession overheard rather than a dialogue with an actual listener.
What happens
The song opens mid-departure, packing and leaving without full resolution with whoever is left behind. It then turns inward, admitting physical and psychological disorientation, before flashing back to a formative trait: using words to argue rather than connect. A brief, almost throwaway romantic encounter passes without weight. The emotional climax arrives when the narrator isolates three words that have become nearly impossible to say sincerely, acknowledging he has become like someone before him. The closing verse widens into a meditation on being trapped by sameness despite constant movement, ending on the repeated, unresolved attempt to simply say those three words.
How it's built
Verse-chorus structure with the chorus functioning as a plea rather than a payoff -- it doesn't resolve, it repeats the same question about the narrator's state each time, reinforcing stasis rather than progress. The bridge-like verse about words traded for fighting sits as the emotional pivot, and the final verse's imagery of identical exits mirrors the chorus's refusal to resolve. The song ends not with a full line but with the fragmented title phrase repeated, as if still rehearsing it.
Section by section
Opening verse
“we are headed north”
The song begins with logistics -- packing, writing a note -- rather than explanation, establishing flight before reflection. The directional detail grounds the song geographically while withholding the reasons for leaving, which arrive only gradually.
First chorus
The plea to the city functions as the song's emotional center of gravity. Its lack of resolution each time it recurs suggests the narrator never actually finds the stability he's asking for -- the question about his condition stays open throughout the song.
Second verse
Looking back at how he first used language, the narrator reveals that conflict, not connection, was his default mode of speech. This retrospective admission reframes the difficulty of saying simple, true things later in the song as a long-standing pattern rather than a sudden collapse.
Dance verse
A brief, almost deliberately underwritten romantic moment passes through without emotional weight, functioning as a contrast to the song's real concern -- the inability to speak sincerely -- rather than as a plot point in itself.
Title verse
“what you were then I am today”
This is the structural and emotional hinge of the song. The narrator links his present difficulty expressing love to an inherited trait, suggesting the song is as much about generational repetition as personal failure.
Closing verse
The imagery of sameness among exits undercuts the earlier sense of purposeful departure, implying that movement itself hasn't produced change. The song ends on repetition of its title phrase rather than a resolved statement, leaving the emotional work unfinished.
Craft
- apostrophe
- Addressing Brooklyn directly as though it were a person able to shelter him externalizes an internal need for grounding, letting a place stand in for the stability a person usually provides.
- synecdoche
- Physical symptoms (shaking hands, a spinning head) stand in for a larger unnamed anxiety, keeping the emotional content indirect and almost clinical.
- refrain as unresolved device
- The chorus repeats without answering its own question, mirroring the narrator's inability to settle or self-diagnose.
- compression into a title phrase
- Reducing an entire confession to three small words makes the climax deliberately understated, enacting the very difficulty the lyric describes rather than just naming it.
Reading it
The most persuasive reading treats the song as being about the gap between movement and transformation: physical relocation (to Brooklyn, away from a former home) doesn't automatically unlock the sincerity the narrator wants to express. The three-word confession withheld until late in the song, then only partially spoken, is less about romantic love specifically and more about an inherited difficulty with vulnerability. An alternative reading focuses more literally on a breakup or exit from a relationship, with Brooklyn functioning as an escape from a specific person -- in that reading, the 'dance' verse and the earlier departure are causally connected. Both readings can coexist since the lyric is deliberately vague about who exactly is left behind.
Context
This is the title track from the Avett Brothers' 2009 album, their major-label debut produced by Rick Rubin, which marked a notable shift toward more polished, introspective songwriting after their earlier, rowdier string-band sound. I don't have confirmed biographical details tying this song to a specific real event in either brother's life, so the departure described should be read as a narrative device rather than a confirmed autobiographical account.
Listen for
- how the chorus's question about the narrator's condition never gets answered musically or lyrically
- the shift in tone between the plainspoken verses and the more vulnerable, hesitant delivery of the title line
- the way physical symptoms substitute for direct emotional language throughout
- the anticlimactic, underplayed treatment of the romantic encounter compared to the weight given to self-reflection
- the repetition of the title phrase at the end, which trails off rather than resolving
About The Avett Brothers
The Avett Brothers are an American folk rock band from Concord, North Carolina. The band is made up of two brothers, Scott Avett and Seth Avett along with Bob Crawford and Joe Kwon.
2000 - present / United States
Full biography and catalogue