Description

JOLEYAH’S HEART
CATEGORY

Family / Personal Tribute / Character Portrait

PRIMARY EMOTION
Pride

ALSO FITS
Love, independence, confidence, strength, personality, self-respect, humour, family, individuality

WHAT THIS SONG IS ABOUT
This song is about my daughter, Joleyah.
It is not me trying to describe some perfect person who never makes mistakes. It is me describing her personality as I see it. She is strong-minded. She can be a lady, she can be tough, she can be funny, she can be sharp, and she is capable of making up her own mind about somebody pretty quickly.
That is really where the title comes from.
JOLEYAH’S HEART is not something you walk into carelessly.
If she gives you a place in it, respect it.
If she gives you her trust, don’t take advantage of it.
And don’t make the mistake of believing that because she cares about somebody, she somehow belongs to them.
One of the most important thoughts in the entire song says exactly that:
When I am with you, I’m all yours.
But when I am without you, I am all mine.
There is a lot packed into those few words.
You can love somebody without surrendering yourself to them.
You can share your life without giving away your identity.
You can be somebody’s partner and still remain your own person.
That independence is a major part of this song.

THE STORY BEHIND THE SONG
Joleyah is my daughter, so naturally this one sits in a different place for me than most songs.
When you write about your own child, you are not looking at a stranger from across the room. You have history. You have memories. You have watched a personality develop. You know the strengths, the attitudes, the humour, the stubbornness, the intelligence, and all those little things that make that person who they are.
That is why I begin with:
“She is who she is.”
I like that statement because it doesn’t ask permission.
It doesn’t say she is trying to become somebody.
It says she already knows who she is.
Throughout the song I play with the different sides of her personality. A woman when she needs to be. A lady when the mood is right. Someone with finesse. Someone who can rock ’n’ roll or dance slow. Someone who can sit, eat, laugh and drink all night. Someone who knows more than she necessarily lets out.
And then I say it as plainly as I can:
“SHE’S SMART.”
There is also humour in the song. I wasn’t going to write about my daughter and suddenly turn into some stiff old poet.
“As bright as the sun” sounds beautiful.
Then I follow it with:
“as sharp as a bees ass.”
That’s much more like me.
But underneath the humour is something serious.
I am talking about a woman who has her own mind, her own strength and her own heart.

WHY I WROTE THIS SONG
I wrote it because Joleyah is my daughter.
Sometimes that is enough of a reason.
There are songs where I am trying to understand history. There are songs where I am angry about something. There are songs where I am trying to understand myself or something I have witnessed.
This one starts much closer to home.
I wanted to put part of Joleyah’s personality into a song.
Not just that I love her.
Of course I love her.
But love by itself doesn’t tell you who somebody is.
I wanted the song to have some of her fire in it.
Her independence.
Her intelligence.
Her ability to make her own decisions.
Her feminine side without portraying femininity as weakness.
Her toughness without pretending toughness means somebody can’t also have grace.
And that line about being “all mine” matters because I never wanted this song to suggest that a woman’s strength depends on who she is standing beside.
Joleyah stands on her own.

WHY THIS MATTERS TO ME
There are hundreds of subjects somebody can write songs about.
Writing about your own family is different.
Years from now, circumstances change. People grow older. Families change. Life keeps moving whether we are ready for it or not.
A song can hold something still.
For me, JOLEYAH’S HEART holds a picture of my daughter through my eyes.
That matters.
There are other parts of my family story and other songs connected to family, including words and songs about Mom and Dad and the love between parents and children. Those are their own chapters. I don’t want to force all of those stories into this one.
This chapter belongs to Joleyah.
And what I wanted preserved here was not simply the fact that she is my daughter.
I wanted some of who she is preserved with it.

WHY THIS SONG FITS MOITA
MOITA is supposed to preserve more than music.
It is supposed to preserve a lifetime.
If I am going to build a library out of the things I have lived, questioned, imagined and cared about, then my daughter belongs in that library.
She isn’t being included because I needed another subject for a song.
She is part of my life.
That makes this personal in a way no amount of fiction could reproduce.
It also fits MOITA because there is something bigger inside the song than simply “this is my daughter.”
There is a message about respecting somebody’s independence.
About understanding that affection is not ownership.
About recognizing strength without being threatened by it.
About knowing when to be polite.
And, apparently, about learning not to mess with Joleyah’s heart.
That last lesson might save somebody some trouble.

READ THIS FIRST
Before reading the lyrics, there is one thing I want clear.
This is a father’s song about his daughter.
Some of the lyrics speak about relationships, being with somebody, dancing, attraction, independence and the way a woman carries herself. I am describing Joleyah and the qualities I see in her. I am not placing myself inside the romantic relationship being described.
Read it as a character portrait.
A father looking at his daughter and saying:
I know who you are.
I know you’re strong.
I know you’re smart.
I know you have your own mind.
And anybody who comes into your life should understand something very quickly.
Respect the woman.
Respect the lady.
Respect her independence.
And don’t mess with
JOLEYAH’S HEART

JOLEYAH’S HEART.
FULL LYRICS

She is who she is
She will make you feel important or the misfit you are
She will use her words wisely
& leave you in aw
Don’t drop your guard
she will see right through you
She is a woman when she needs to be
She is a lady when the mood is right
She has finesse so be polite
Don’t take advantage of her or she’ll tare your part
So don’t mess with JOLEYAH’S HEART

She said babe
when I am with you, I’m all yours
But when I am without you
I am all mine
She is right as rain, so think again
She’s everything that makes a woman a lady
She’s everything that makes a lady a woman she’s strong She can recover the past by the coming of her future Beauty in her life comes in two forms beauty with the eyes & beauty from the heart
You know she is as bright as the sun so think fast
Because she’s as sharp as a bees ass
She knows more than she lets out
SHE’S SMART
So don’t mess with
JOLEYAH’S HEART

She is who she is.
She’s in full control,
She won’t let you control her role.
She makes her stand,
she holds the upper hand. She has the powers, she doesn’t need you.
She’s a woman when she needs to be.
She’s a lady when the mood is right.
She has finesse, so be polite. Don’t take advantage of her or she’ll tare you a part.
So don’t mess with JOLEYAH’S HEART.

She said babe
when I am with you, I’m all yours
But when I am without you
I am all mine
She is right as rain, so think again
She’s everything that makes a woman a lady
She’s everything that makes a lady a woman she’s strong She can recover the past by the coming of her future Beauty in her life comes in two forms beauty with the eyes & beauty from the heart
You know she is as bright as the sun, so think fast
Because she’s as sharp as a bees ass
She knows more than she lets out
SHE’S SMART
So don’t mess with JOLEYAH’S HEART

She is who she is,
She’s not everybody’s thing & you can think what you want.
She’s a lady with grace,
so control your pace.
When you ask her to dance, she will rock ‘n’ roll,
or she will dance slow.
She will sit eat laugh and drink All night.
She’s a woman when she wants to be.
She’s a lady when the mood is right.
She has finesse so be polite. Don’t take a vantage of her or she will tare you apart. Don’t mess with
JOLEYAH’S HEART.

She said babe
when I am with you, I’m all yours
But when I am without you
I am all mine
She is right as rain, so think again
She’s everything that makes a woman a lady
She’s everything that makes a lady a woman she’s strong She can recover the past by the coming of her future Beauty in her life comes in two forms beauty with the eyes & beauty from the heart
You know she is as bright as the sun, so think fast
Because she’s as sharp as a bees ass
She knows more than she lets out
SHE’S SMART
So don’t mess with JOLEYAH’S HEART

SECTION ONE
LYRIC JOURNEY
PART 1

“She is who she is”
That is where I wanted to begin because before I tell you anything else about Joleyah, I want those words standing on their own.
She is who she is.
She is my daughter, but she isn’t an extension of me.
That’s an important distinction for a parent to understand.
When your children are young, you have enormous influence over their lives. You teach them. You protect them. You make decisions for them because they aren’t old enough to make all those decisions themselves. You try to give them some understanding of right and wrong, and naturally you hope some of your own values travel with them.
But you’re not raising somebody so they can remain a child forever.
You’re raising somebody who will eventually become their own person.
That means there comes a point when they have opinions you didn’t give them. They make decisions you wouldn’t necessarily make. They may see something completely differently from you.
That isn’t automatically disrespect.
Sometimes that’s adulthood.
Joleyah has her own personality, and I didn’t want to begin this song by telling her who she should be.
I wanted to begin by recognizing who she already is.
“She will make you feel important or the misfit you are”
Now we’re beginning to see some attitude.
I wasn’t interested in writing one of those songs where Dad describes his daughter as absolutely perfect from beginning to end.
She’s a human being.
She has personality.
And she can read people.
If she likes you, respects you and feels comfortable around you, she can make you feel important.
But there’s another side.
If something about you doesn’t sit right with her, don’t assume she isn’t noticing.
That’s what I mean by the “misfit.”
I’m not talking about somebody who is different or doesn’t fit society’s idea of normal. I’m talking about somebody who doesn’t fit honestly into that particular situation.
There is a difference.
Maybe you’re pretending.
Maybe you’re trying too hard.
Maybe your words and actions don’t match.
Maybe something simply feels wrong.
People sometimes notice those things long before they can explain exactly what they’re noticing.
“She will use her words wisely
& leave you in aw”
That follows naturally because noticing something and knowing how to respond to it are two different abilities.
Some people react immediately.
Some people listen first.
They let you talk.
They watch.
Then when they finally say something, there can be a lot more behind those few words than you expected.
I have spent a huge part of my life working with words. Songwriting taught me that sometimes the strongest line isn’t the longest one. Sometimes removing ten words makes the remaining five hit harder.
Conversation can work the same way.
You don’t always need to overpower somebody with words.
Sometimes you just need the right ones.
That’s the quality I’m pointing toward here.
“Don’t drop your guard
she will see right through you”
Now the first few lines start connecting.
She notices.
She listens.
She chooses her words.
And she sees.
There is almost a challenge hidden inside “don’t drop your guard.”
What exactly are you guarding?
If you’re genuine, there shouldn’t be some completely different person hiding behind the presentation.
We all behave differently in different situations. That’s normal. I don’t expect somebody to talk to their grandmother exactly the same way they talk to their buddies.
That’s not what I’m talking about.
I’m talking about pretending to be somebody you’re not because you want something from another person.
That becomes difficult to maintain.
You can rehearse words.
Character is harder to rehearse.
Eventually the little contradictions start showing.
And if somebody is paying attention, they may see through you long before you realize they’ve figured you out.
“She is a woman when she needs to be
She is a lady when the mood is right”
This is where I start showing the different sides of Joleyah.
I wasn’t trying to create a definition of what every woman should be.
I’m talking about one woman.
My daughter.
Sometimes life calls for strength.
Sometimes it calls for grace.
Sometimes you stand your ground.
Sometimes you can relax.
Sometimes you want to dress up and carry yourself one way.
Sometimes you want to rock ’n’ roll.
Human beings aren’t one thing all day, every day.
I actually think that’s part of what makes people interesting.
The woman and the lady don’t compete with each other in this song.
They’re the same person.
“She has finesse so be polite”
Finesse is important.
Strength doesn’t always have to arrive with a fist on the table.
There are people who can control a situation without becoming the loudest person in it.
They know when to speak.
They know when to wait.
They know when something isn’t worth their time.
And then I put something extremely simple beside that:
Be polite.
That’s not exactly revolutionary advice.
But maybe we overlook simple things because we’re always looking for complicated answers.
How you speak to somebody matters.
How you approach them matters.
Respect matters.
You don’t need a psychology degree to understand that.
“Don’t take advantage of her or she’ll tare your part”
Now Dad enters the room a little more.
I knew exactly what kind of line I was writing.
There is a warning in it.
But the warning isn’t:
Her father is going to come after you.
That’s too easy.
Look at everything I’ve already told you about her.
She sees through people.
She chooses her words.
She has finesse.
She’s capable of standing for herself.
So when I say don’t take advantage of her, the consequence isn’t supposed to be some father waiting around the corner.
The consequence is that eventually you’re going to meet the other side of the woman whose kindness or affection you underestimated.
Being good to somebody doesn’t make you weak.
Trusting somebody doesn’t make you stupid.
Giving somebody an opportunity doesn’t mean they get unlimited opportunities.
Everybody has a line.
I want my daughter to have one.
“So don’t mess with JOLEYAH’S HEART”
And now we arrive at the title for the first time.
If somebody only saw the title before hearing the song, they might expect a protective father song.
Don’t hurt my little girl.
Stay away from my daughter.
Dad is watching you.
There is a little of that instinct in me. I’m her father. I’m not going to pretend otherwise.
But that’s not where I wanted the song to stay.
Because it would actually weaken Joleyah if the entire message were:
Don’t hurt her because I will protect her.
She’s an adult woman.
She doesn’t need the song to turn her into somebody helpless.
The stronger meaning is:
Don’t mess with her heart because it belongs to somebody who understands her own value.
That changes the warning.
And now the song lets Joleyah speak.
“She said babe”
Those words open the door to a relationship.
We’re no longer simply standing beside her while I describe her personality.
We’re hearing something she says to the person she’s with.
“when I am with you, I’m all yours”
That’s commitment.
There’s nothing halfway about it.
When I’m with you, I’m with you.
You matter.
The relationship matters.
There is affection in that statement.
There is trust in it too.
If the lyric ended there, you could hear it as somebody giving themselves completely to another person.
But it doesn’t end there.
“But when I am without you
I am all mine”
This is one of the landmarks of the entire song.
I wouldn’t rush past it.
Because these two lines change the meaning of the two lines before them.
“When I am with you, I’m all yours.”
“But when I am without you, I am all mine.”
That is love without surrendering your identity.
There is a huge difference between giving yourself to somebody and losing yourself inside somebody.
People can fall in love and slowly stop doing things they once enjoyed.
Friendships can disappear.
Interests can disappear.
Confidence can disappear.
Sometimes one person starts making every decision.
Sometimes the other person doesn’t even notice how much of themselves they’ve given away until much later.
That isn’t the kind of love I wanted represented here.
The line doesn’t say:
I don’t need love.
It says:
Love doesn’t erase me.
That is much stronger.
When we’re together, I can give you my attention, my affection, my loyalty and my heart.
When we’re apart, I don’t become half a person waiting for you to return.
I am still me.
I am all mine.
As her father, I like that.
I want my daughter capable of loving somebody deeply.
But I don’t want her identity depending entirely on whether another person is standing beside her.
And this works both ways.
A man shouldn’t have to disappear inside a relationship either.
Neither person should.
Two complete people can build something together.
That is very different from two people trying to own each other.
And suddenly the title means a little more.
JOLEYAH’S HEART.
Whose heart?
Hers.
She decides who receives it.
She decides how much of herself she shares.
And she remains herself whether somebody is beside her or not.
“She is right as rain, so think again”
The song moves again.
After a statement that could become quite serious, I don’t want to turn the song into a lecture.
So we get moving.
Think again.
Thought you had her figured out?
Maybe not.
Thought independence meant she couldn’t commit?
The previous lines just told you otherwise.
Thought commitment meant she surrendered control of herself?
Think again.
“She’s everything that makes a woman a lady
She’s everything that makes a lady a woman she’s strong”
Now strength enters directly.
Earlier I separated woman and lady to show different sides of the same person.
Here they begin folding into each other.
What makes a woman a lady?
What makes a lady a woman?
I’m not trying to write the dictionary definition.
I’m describing what I see.
Grace can exist with strength.
Strength can exist with femininity.
Confidence doesn’t make a woman less feminine.
Standing her ground doesn’t take away her finesse.
There are old ideas about what women are supposed to be, just as there are old ideas about what men are supposed to be.
Life is usually more complicated than those little boxes.
Joleyah can be strong.
She can be soft.
She can be serious.
She can laugh.
She can need somebody.
She can need nobody for a while.
Those things don’t cancel one another.
“She can recover the past by the coming of her future”
This is another place where I want to stay.
Because taken literally, nobody can recover the past.
Yesterday is gone.
You can’t drive back into it.
You can’t repair every decision.
You can’t unsay something.
You can’t make something that happened suddenly not have happened.
So what does it mean to recover the past through the coming of the future?
To me, it means the future can change the size of the past.
Something can feel enormous while you’re living through it.
A relationship ends and it feels like everything.
A mistake feels permanent.
A disappointment feels like the direction of your entire life has just been decided.
Then life keeps moving.
A year passes.
Five years pass.
New people arrive.
New experiences happen.
You learn things.
You change.
And eventually that thing that once filled your entire view becomes one part of a much larger landscape.
It hasn’t disappeared.
It just doesn’t own everything anymore.
That’s recovery.
Not pretending.
Not forgetting.
Continuing.
As a father, that’s something I want for my daughter because I can’t promise her a life without disappointment.
Nobody can promise their child that.
What I can hope is that whatever happens behind her never becomes powerful enough to steal everything waiting ahead of her.
Her future should always have a voice.
“Beauty in her life comes in two forms beauty with the eyes & beauty from the heart”
Now we move from time into beauty.
And I deliberately gave beauty two forms.
The first one is obvious.
Beauty with the eyes.
It’s what you see.
It’s the first impression.
Physical attraction exists. I’m not going to pretend it doesn’t.
But if that’s the only beauty somebody recognizes, they’re missing most of the person.
Beauty from the heart takes time.
You have to see somebody around other people.
You have to see how they behave when things aren’t going perfectly.
You have to see whether their words have anything behind them.
You have to see whether kindness survives inconvenience.
Whether loyalty survives difficulty.
Whether they can laugh.
Whether they care.
Whether they can admit a mistake.
Whether they can forgive one.
That beauty isn’t always visible in a photograph.
But it can become the beauty that matters most.
As her father, naturally I can look at Joleyah and see a beautiful daughter.
But I’m not writing a song about a photograph.
I’m writing about the person inside it.
And that’s why the heart has been sitting in the title from the very beginning.

SECTION ONE
LYRIC JOURNEY
PART 2

“You know she is as bright as the sun so think fast”
Now we’re coming out of that quieter thought about beauty and the song gets some movement back into it.
Bright as the sun.
There are a couple of ways somebody can hear “bright.”
You can hear beauty in it. Somebody who lights up a room. Somebody whose presence gets noticed.
But you can also hear intelligence.
Bright.
Sharp.
Quick.
And because of where the next lines go, that second meaning matters.
“So think fast.”
That’s almost me telling you not to get too comfortable.
Don’t assume you’re three moves ahead.
You might discover she’s already been watching the board.
“Because she’s as sharp as a bees ass”
There it is.
I could have stayed poetic.
Bright as the sun.
Beautiful.
Nice image.
Then I went straight to a bee’s ass.
That’s much more like a real conversation with me.
I like humour in songs when it belongs there because people aren’t serious every minute of their lives. Families certainly aren’t.
You can be talking about something meaningful one second and somebody says something completely ridiculous the next.
That’s human.
And underneath the joke, the point is still there.
She’s sharp.
Quick-minded.
Aware.
I’m complimenting my daughter’s intelligence while apparently refusing to do it like a normal person.
“She knows more than she lets out”
This is different from simply knowing things.
There are people who need everybody around them to know exactly how much they know.
Then there are people who don’t show every card they’re holding.
They listen.
They watch.
They let somebody continue talking.
Sometimes the person doing all the talking assumes the quiet person hasn’t figured anything out.
That can be a mistake.
I think observation is an underrated kind of intelligence.
If you’re always preparing your next sentence, you’re not necessarily hearing what the other person is telling you.
Listening gives you information.
Watching gives you information.
And sometimes saying nothing gives somebody else enough room to show you exactly who they are.
That’s why this line fits so naturally with the beginning of the song.
Remember where we started:
“Don’t drop your guard
she will see right through you”
Now we’re seeing why.
She may know more than she’s letting you know she knows.
And then I remove every bit of subtlety.
“SHE’S SMART”
That’s it.
No metaphor.
No fancy language.
No bee.
No sun.
SHE’S SMART.
Sometimes a songwriter should know when to stop decorating a thought.
I wanted that statement standing there because it is something I want preserved about my daughter.
I see her intelligence.
I’m proud of it.
And I don’t want anybody confusing a woman choosing not to show everything she knows with a woman who doesn’t know what’s going on.
“So don’t mess with
JOLEYAH’S HEART”
The chorus brings us back to the title.
But we’re not standing where we were the first time we heard it.
The first warning came after I introduced her ability to read people, use her words and carry herself with finesse.
Now we’ve gone further.
We’ve learned how she thinks about relationships.
We’ve heard:
“I am all mine.”
We’ve talked about her future.
We’ve looked at two kinds of beauty.
And now we’ve ended on intelligence.
So “don’t mess with JOLEYAH’S HEART” carries more information than it did before.
The heart belongs to somebody we’ve started getting to know.
Then the song circles back to its opening statement.
“She is who she is.”
When a line returns, I always ask whether we’ve changed since the last time we heard it.
Here we have.
At the beginning, “she is who she is” was an introduction.
Now it sounds more like confirmation.
We’ve spent time with her.
We’ve seen independence.
We’ve seen intelligence.
We’ve seen the difference between outward beauty and what’s inside.
So when I say it again, I’m not introducing her anymore.
I’m reminding you that none of those qualities were borrowed for the song.
They’re parts of the same person.
“She’s in full control,”
Now the independence that was implied earlier becomes direct.
Full control.
Not control of everybody around her.
That’s not the kind of control I’m interested in.
Control of herself.
Her decisions.
Her direction.
Her role.
Her life.
There is a big difference between being in control of yourself and needing to control everybody else.
One is independence.
The other can become domination.
I want the first one for my daughter.
“She won’t let you control her role.”
That word “role” matters.
People can enter relationships carrying a script.
Sometimes they don’t even realize they’re carrying one.
This is what the man should do.
This is what the woman should do.
This is what a girlfriend should be.
This is what a wife should be.
This is how somebody should dress.
These are the friends they should have.
This is how much time they should spend with me.
This is what they should give up.
But the person standing in front of you may not have read your script.
Joleyah gets to decide her role.
That doesn’t mean relationships don’t involve compromise.
Of course they do.
If two people are building a life together and neither is ever willing to adjust anything for the other, they’re probably going to have a rough time.
But compromise is something two people work out.
Control is something one person imposes.
Those aren’t the same thing.
“She makes her stand,”
There comes a point when thinking something isn’t enough.
You have to stand behind it.
A boundary that disappears every time somebody challenges it isn’t much of a boundary.
Making your stand doesn’t mean turning every disagreement into a war.
Sometimes a stand is very quiet.
No.
I’m not comfortable with that.
I don’t agree.
I’m not doing that.
This is what I want.
I’m leaving.
I’m staying.
Those can all be stands.
And sometimes saying one of those things calmly takes more strength than screaming.
“she holds the upper hand.”
This line can sound like the relationship is supposed to be a competition.
That isn’t how I mean it.
I don’t want my daughter spending her life trying to defeat whoever she’s with.
What I mean is that she isn’t powerless.
She has a say.
She has choices.
She can make decisions.
She doesn’t have to stay somewhere simply because somebody expects her to.
The upper hand is knowing you still have yourself.
That’s important because the next words push that idea even harder.
“She has the powers, she doesn’t need you.”
Now that’s a line somebody could misunderstand if they pulled it out of the song and ignored everything around it.
“She doesn’t need you.”
Does that mean relationships are useless?
No.
Does it mean love doesn’t matter?
No.
Does it mean Joleyah should go through life refusing help from everybody?
No.
We already heard:
“When I am with you, I’m all yours.”
The song has already made room for love.
So “she doesn’t need you” means something different.
It means she doesn’t need another person in order to become a complete human being.
Wanting somebody is not the same as being unable to exist without them.
I actually think there is something powerful about being chosen by somebody who knows they could stand on their own.
They aren’t with you because they have nowhere else to go.
They’re with you because they want you there.
That’s a better kind of connection.
And as a father, that’s what I would hope for my daughter.
Not somebody she cannot survive without.
Somebody she chooses to share her life with.
“She’s a woman when she needs to be.
She’s a lady when the mood is right.”
We’ve heard these thoughts before.
I don’t need to rebuild them from the ground up.
What has changed is what we now know before arriving here.
The first time, these lines introduced different sides of her personality.
Now they follow control, choice and independence.
So the woman and the lady feel less like descriptions and more like decisions.
She can decide how she carries herself.
“She has finesse, so be polite.”
Again, the simple request.
Respect.
And after everything we’ve travelled through, “be polite” almost becomes funny in its understatement.
I’ve just spent all this time telling you she is independent, observant, intelligent and capable of making her stand.
Then I basically say:
So maybe use your manners.
Sometimes the simplest advice really is the best advice.
“Don’t take advantage of her or she’ll tare you a part.”
The warning returns.
But once again, the journey has changed it.
Earlier it sounded protective.
Now we’ve just been told:
“She’s in full control.”
“She won’t let you control her role.”
“She makes her stand.”
“She holds the upper hand.”
“She has the powers.”
So who is doing the protecting now?
She is.
That’s where I wanted the song to go.
I’m still Dad.
I will always have that instinct.
But I don’t want to write my daughter as somebody permanently standing behind me while I fight her battles.
There are battles in life she will have to handle herself.
There are decisions only she can make.
There are people only she can decide whether to trust.
There are relationships only she can decide whether to continue.
A parent eventually has to understand that.
“So don’t mess with JOLEYAH’S HEART.”
Now the title lands again.
And this time it almost feels like Joleyah owns the warning herself.
Not:
Watch out for Dad.
Watch out because this woman knows where she stands.
Then the chorus returns.
“She said babe
when I am with you, I’m all yours
But when I am without you
I am all mine”
The words haven’t changed.
But the verse between the first chorus and this one has changed what we’re carrying into them.
The first time, “I am all mine” established independence.
This time, we’ve just heard exactly what that independence looks like:
She won’t let somebody control her role.
She makes her stand.
She has power.
She doesn’t require another person to complete her.
So I don’t need to explain the chorus all over again.
We already know what it means.
What matters now is that the song has proven it.
The chorus isn’t just telling us she’s independent anymore.
The verse showed us.
“She is right as rain, so think again”
Think again returns almost like a little grin.
Still think you’ve figured her out?
Keep listening.
“She’s everything that makes a woman a lady
She’s everything that makes a lady a woman she’s strong”
Strength returns, but now we’ve seen some examples of it.
Strength isn’t just a word anymore.
It’s standing.
Choosing.
Keeping your identity.
Refusing control.
“She can recover the past by the coming of her future”
The future returns too.
And because the previous verse has been about personal control, this line feels slightly different now.
The future isn’t simply something that happens to her.
She has some say in how she walks toward it.
Nobody controls everything that happens in life.
That’s fantasy.
Things happen that we didn’t ask for.
People leave.
Plans fail.
Circumstances change.
But there is still a difference between controlling everything and having some control over what you do next.
That next decision matters.
Then the chorus returns to the two kinds of beauty.
“Beauty in her life comes in two forms beauty with the eyes & beauty from the heart”
We have already stood here, so we don’t need to repeat the whole conversation.
But after a verse about independence and strength, beauty from the heart now has more character behind it.
We’re not talking only about kindness.
Inner beauty can include courage.
Self-respect.
Knowing when to stand.
Knowing who you are.
“You know she is as bright as the sun, so think fast
Because she’s as sharp as a bees ass”
And there is my bee again.
Somehow it survived the second chorus.
I’m glad it did.
A song about somebody you love shouldn’t become so serious that their personality disappears underneath the message.
The humour keeps Joleyah human.
It keeps me human too.
“She knows more than she lets out
SHE’S SMART”
We’ve already established this.
The repetition now works almost like Dad underlining it.
In case you missed me the first time:
She’s smart.
“So don’t mess with JOLEYAH’S HEART”
And again we arrive at the title.
But we’re not finished.
The song has shown us how Joleyah thinks and how she stands.
Now it’s going to show us something else.
What she’s like when she’s simply living.
“She is who she is,”
For the third time, we return home.
But each return has carried more with it.
The first was introduction.
The second was confirmation.
This one feels almost like acceptance without negotiation.
Because the very next line makes that clear.
“She’s not everybody’s thing & you can think what you want.”
I like this line because it’s honest.
She’s not everybody’s thing.
Good.
Nobody should be.
I certainly am not everybody’s thing.
If I spent my life trying to make every person approve of me, I wouldn’t have much of myself left.
The same applies to Joleyah.
Some people are going to love her personality.
Some aren’t.
Some will understand her.
Some won’t.
Some will think she’s too strong.
Some may think she’s too independent.
Some might not understand her humour.
Some may simply not connect with her.
That’s allowed.
What isn’t necessary is changing yourself every time somebody doesn’t approve.
“You can think what you want.”
There is freedom in that sentence.
Other people are entitled to their opinions.
But an opinion isn’t automatically an instruction.
You don’t have to rebuild yourself every time somebody forms one.
And that brings the journey right back to where the song began:
She is who she is.
“She’s a lady with grace,
so control your pace.”
Now something interesting happens.
The song has spent a lot of time telling us how strong she is.
Here it softens.
Grace.
Pace.
Don’t rush.
Let the moment be what it is.
Not everything in life needs to be conquered.
Not every relationship needs to move at somebody else’s speed.
Sometimes respecting another person means allowing them the time to decide what they want.
And then, finally, we stop talking about who Joleyah is and actually watch her enjoying herself.
“When you ask her to dance, she will rock ‘n’ roll,
or she will dance slow.”
I can see the person in this line.
That’s why I like it.
Until now we’ve been talking about ideas.
Independence.
Strength.
Intelligence.
Beauty.
Boundaries.
Now there’s music playing.
Somebody asks her to dance.
And once again, she isn’t one thing.
Rock ’n’ roll?
Sure.
Slow dance?
That too.
The choice depends on the moment.
The song has been telling us all along that she doesn’t fit into one little box.
Even the dance floor proves it.
“She will sit eat laugh and drink All night.”
This may look like one of the smallest lines in the song.
To me, it isn’t.
Because this is where life actually happens.

SECTION ONE
LYRIC JOURNEY
PART 3

Not every important memory comes from some enormous event.
Sometimes it is sitting around a table.
Eating.
Laughing.
Having a drink.
Talking longer than anybody planned.
Looking at the clock and realizing the whole night disappeared.
Those ordinary moments can become some of the memories you carry the longest.
And I like having this line here because after everything I’ve said about Joleyah’s strength, independence and intelligence, I don’t want those qualities to turn her into some kind of character on a pedestal.
She’s my daughter.
She’s a person.
She can sit down, eat, laugh, have a drink and enjoy the night.
That’s life too.
Actually, sometimes that’s the best part of it.
“She’s a woman when she wants to be.”
There is a small change here that matters.
Earlier I wrote:
“She is a woman when she needs to be”
Now it’s:
“She’s a woman when she wants to be.”
Need becomes want.
That fits where we’ve arrived.
Earlier parts of the song dealt more with standing your ground, reading people and protecting your independence.
There were situations that might require strength.
Now we’re in a different place.
We’re dancing.
We’re eating.
We’re laughing.
We’re enjoying ourselves.
She doesn’t have to become anything because a situation demands it.
She gets to choose.
That one word changes the feeling.
“She’s a lady when the mood is right.”
And there is the mood again.
Not a rule.
Not a permanent performance.
Not somebody telling her how a lady is supposed to behave.
The mood is right.
That’s the whole point.
There are times for seriousness.
There are times for manners.
There are times to dress up.
There are times to sit around and laugh until somebody nearly falls off the chair.
There are times for rock ’n’ roll.
There are times for a slow dance.
A full life has room for all of it.
“She has finesse so be polite.”
By now this line has become familiar.
I don’t need to explain finesse again.
The song has already shown it.
What I notice this time is how consistently respect keeps returning.
Through all the different sides of Joleyah, that request never really changes.
Be polite.
You don’t have to be afraid of her.
You don’t have to worship her.
You don’t have to agree with everything she says.
Just respect the person standing in front of you.
That’s not too much to ask of anybody.
“Don’t take a vantage of her or she will tare you apart.”
And there is the warning one final time in the verse.
By now, I think the reader understands it.
This isn’t a helpless daughter song.
It never was.
The father in me is certainly present, but the song has gradually moved the responsibility away from me and toward Joleyah herself.
She can recognize disrespect.
She can make her stand.
She can decide what she accepts.
She can decide what she walks away from.
That’s part of having your own heart.
“Don’t mess with
JOLEYAH’S HEART.”
And now the title has travelled almost the entire song with us.
At the beginning, it could have sounded like Dad standing at the front door.
By this point, it means something much bigger.
Don’t play games with somebody’s trust.
Don’t confuse love with ownership.
Don’t mistake kindness for weakness.
Don’t assume independence means somebody cannot love deeply.
Don’t take another person’s heart simply because they’re willing to give you access to it.
And don’t assume access means ownership.
That last part matters.
Because the final chorus returns us to the line that has been carrying that idea from the beginning.
“She said babe
when I am with you, I’m all yours
But when I am without you
I am all mine”
The first time we heard this, it opened the idea.
The second time, the song had shown us the independence behind it.
Now, on the final return, we’ve seen something else.
We’ve seen her living.
Dancing.
Laughing.
Eating.
Enjoying herself.
Being serious when she wants.
Being graceful when the mood is right.
Being exactly who she is even when somebody else might decide she’s “not everybody’s thing.”
So “I am all mine” doesn’t sound lonely.
That’s important.
Independence can sometimes be written as isolation.
I don’t see it that way here.
Being your own person doesn’t mean sitting alone in a room proving you don’t need anybody.
Joleyah can love somebody.
She can dance with somebody.
She can spend the night laughing with people.
She can give herself fully to a relationship while she’s in it.
And she can still belong to herself.
That is where these lines finally land for me.
Love should add to who you are.
It shouldn’t require the disappearance of who you were.
“She is right as rain, so think again”
One final invitation to reconsider whatever assumption you brought into the song.
Maybe you thought strength meant hardness.
Think again.
Maybe you thought independence meant being alone.
Think again.
Maybe you thought being a lady meant behaving according to somebody else’s rules.
Think again.
Maybe you thought a father writing about his daughter would spend the entire song threatening anybody who came near her.
Think again.
I wanted something better for her than that.
“She’s everything that makes a woman a lady
She’s everything that makes a lady a woman she’s strong”
On the final journey through these words, I don’t feel the need to separate woman, lady and strength anymore.
The song has already brought them together.
They’re all Joleyah.
And maybe that’s one of the larger things sitting underneath this song.
We spend a lot of time putting labels on people.
Strong.
Soft.
Independent.
Beautiful.
Difficult.
Smart.
Funny.
Serious.
Woman.
Lady.
As though choosing one means surrendering another.
Real people don’t work like that.
Somebody can be several things before breakfast.
That’s why I began the entire song with:
“She is who she is.”
Everything since then has really been me showing you what I meant.
“She can recover the past by the coming of her future”
Now this line arrives for the final time.
Earlier, I talked about how the future cannot erase the past.
I still believe that.
But after travelling through the whole song, there’s something else I hear in it.
A parent eventually has to trust the future too.
When your child is little, you’re involved in nearly everything.
You know where they’re going.
You know who they’re with.
You make decisions.
You try to keep danger away.
Then adulthood changes the arrangement.
You don’t get to see every road before they walk down it.
You don’t get to approve every person before they meet them.
You don’t get to prevent every mistake.
And you certainly can’t write their future for them.
That can be difficult for a parent because protecting your child was once part of your everyday responsibility.
Eventually protection has to make room for trust.
You hope what you’ve given them travels with them.
You hope their own intelligence carries them even further.
And then you have to allow the future to belong to them.
Joleyah’s future belongs to Joleyah.
I can be part of it.
I can love her through it.
I can offer something when she wants it.
But I can’t live it for her.
“Beauty in her life comes in two forms beauty with the eyes & beauty from the heart”
We return to beauty one last time.
And after everything else we’ve learned, the second kind has become much easier to see.
Beauty from the heart isn’t one characteristic.
It is built from many things.
How somebody loves.
How they treat people.
Whether they respect themselves.
Whether they can laugh.
Whether they can recover.
Whether they know when to stand.
Whether they can remain themselves while still making room for somebody else.
Physical beauty gets noticed quickly.
Character takes longer.
That’s why a song can do something a photograph can’t.
A photograph can show you my daughter.
A song gives me a chance to tell you something about the person I see when I look beyond the photograph.
“You know she is as bright as the sun, so think fast”
The sun returns.
Brightness returns.
And now we’ve travelled far enough that I don’t have to choose whether “bright” means beautiful or intelligent.
It can mean both.
The whole song has allowed both to exist.
“Because she’s as sharp as a bees ass”
And thank God the bee made it all the way to the end.
Because after talking about parenting, independence, relationships, identity, beauty, the past and the future, I still don’t want to leave you thinking my daughter and I walk around speaking in philosophical quotations all day.
Life needs some humour.
Songs need personality.
And this song definitely has some.
“She knows more than she lets out”
One last reminder.
Don’t underestimate her.
Sometimes intelligence announces itself.
Sometimes it watches.
Sometimes it waits.
Sometimes it already understands exactly what is happening and simply hasn’t told you yet.
“SHE’S SMART”
And once again I stop being clever.
I don’t need another metaphor.
I don’t need another paragraph trying to improve the sentence.
She’s smart.
Her father said it.
I’m leaving it there.
“So don’t mess with JOLEYAH’S HEART”
And finally we arrive where the entire journey has been taking us.
JOLEYAH’S HEART.
When we first saw those words, they sounded like a warning.
They still are.
But if that’s all somebody takes from the title after travelling through the entire song, they’ve missed most of the journey.
The heart in this song isn’t something fragile sitting in a glass case.
It’s the centre of the person I’ve been describing.
A woman who can love somebody without giving away ownership of herself.
A woman who can stand her ground.
A woman who can be graceful.
A woman who can rock ’n’ roll.
A woman who can slow dance.
A woman who can sit around a table eating, drinking and laughing through the night.
A woman who has a past and still owns a future.
A woman with beauty the eyes can see and beauty that takes longer to discover.
A woman who notices more than she necessarily says.
A woman who is smart.
My daughter.
Joleyah.
And maybe the most important thing I can do as her father isn’t to stand in front of her heart forever trying to guard it from the entire world.
Maybe it’s to recognize that the heart belongs to her.
I can love it.
I can care about what happens to it.
I can hurt when she hurts.
I can be proud when she’s happy.
I can give advice.
I can worry.
That’s part of being Dad.
But I don’t own her heart either.
She does.
That brings me all the way back to the first words of the song.
“She is who she is.”
After everything we’ve travelled through, I wouldn’t want to change them.
Because this song was never supposed to tell Joleyah who to become.
It was me looking at my daughter and saying:
I see who you are.
I see your strength.
I see your intelligence.
I see your independence.
I see your humour.
I see your beauty.
And I see your heart.
So if somebody wants to be part of that heart, respect it.
If she gives you love, value it.
If she gives you trust, don’t abuse it.
And if she chooses you, understand something from the beginning.
She can be yours when she’s with you.
But she will always be her own.
That’s JOLEYAH’S HEART.

SECTION TWO
THE STORY
JOLEYAH IS MY DAUGHTER

There are some songs where I have to explain where the idea came from.
Not this one.
Joleyah is my daughter.
That is where the song came from.
But saying that only explains why her name is in the title. It doesn’t explain why I wrote the song the way I did.
I didn’t want to write one of those songs where a father spends the whole time telling everybody how beautiful and wonderful his daughter is. There is nothing wrong with that, but Joleyah’s personality gave me much more to work with.
I wanted character.
I wanted attitude.
I wanted humour.
I wanted strength.
Most of all, I wanted her independence to come through.
That is why the first words are so simple:
“She is who she is.”
That became the foundation of everything that follows.
I am not introducing somebody who needs to be changed.
I am introducing somebody who already has a personality of her own.
A DAUGHTER BECOMES HER OWN PERSON
One of the strange things about being a parent is that your child begins life completely dependent on you.
Then little by little that changes.
They develop opinions you didn’t give them.
They make decisions you wouldn’t necessarily make.
They like things you might not like.
They meet people you didn’t choose.
They begin building a life that belongs to them.
Eventually you have to recognize something very important.
Your child is still your child.
But that child is also an adult.
That distinction matters in JOLEYAH’S HEART.
I am her father, but the woman described in this song doesn’t exist for me to control.
In fact, control is one of the things the song pushes against:
“She won’t let you control her role.”
That applies far beyond one relationship.
There comes a point where a parent has to respect the adult their child has become.
You can advise.
You can worry.
You can disagree.
You can probably drive each other crazy once in a while.
But their life belongs to them.
I think that is part of loving somebody properly.
THE WOMAN AND THE LADY
I deliberately keep returning to two descriptions:
“She is a woman when she needs to be.”
“She is a lady when the mood is right.”
I wasn’t trying to create some complicated definition of what a woman or a lady is supposed to be.
Quite the opposite.
I was playing with the different sides of one person.
Someone can be strong without being hard all the time.
Someone can have grace without becoming passive.
Someone can be polite and still tell you exactly where the line is.
Someone can dress up, dance slow and carry herself like a lady, then turn around and rock ’n’ roll.
Why shouldn’t she?
People are complicated.
My daughter is no exception.
I like that about people.
The interesting ones usually cannot be explained with one word.
“WHEN I AM WITHOUT YOU I AM ALL MINE”
There is one part of this song that carries much more weight than its size:
“She said babe
when I am with you, I’m all yours
But when I am without you
I am all mine”
That is probably one of the clearest statements of independence anywhere in the song.
There is love in it, but there is a boundary too.
Being committed to somebody doesn’t mean disappearing into them.
It doesn’t mean giving up your identity.
It doesn’t mean another person gets ownership of every part of your life.
You can give somebody your love without handing them the deed to who you are.
I think that is an important distinction.
It is especially important in a song called JOLEYAH’S HEART because the title could easily have become overly protective. I could have written the stereotypical father warning every man on Earth to stay away from his daughter.
That isn’t what I wanted.
Joleyah doesn’t need me standing at the door deciding who gets through.
The song gives that power to her.
It is her heart.
She decides.
MY WARNING IS REALLY ABOUT RESPECT
“So don’t mess with JOLEYAH’S HEART.”
It sounds like a warning from Dad, and there is certainly some of that in there.
I’m not going to pretend otherwise.
But read the rest of the lyrics.
Who actually holds the power?
She does.
“She’s in full control.”
“She won’t let you control her role.”
“She makes her stand.”
“She holds the upper hand.”
“She has the powers, she doesn’t need you.”
That changes the meaning of the warning.
I’m not saying, “Watch out because her father is coming after you.”
I’m saying, “Don’t underestimate her.”
There is a big difference.
If you treat her properly, she’ll decide what you mean to her.
If you don’t, she’ll decide that too.
BEAUTY IN TWO FORMS
There is another thought in the song that I wanted to make clear:
“Beauty in her life comes in two forms beauty with the eyes & beauty from the heart”
Physical beauty is easy to notice.
Character takes longer.
Anybody can look across a room and decide somebody is attractive. You don’t know much from that.
Spend time with somebody and eventually you begin seeing the other kind.
How do they treat people?
How do they carry themselves?
What do they do when something goes wrong?
Are they thoughtful?
Are they strong?
Can they laugh?
Can they admit when they’re wrong?
Do they have compassion?
Do they have a heart?
That second kind of beauty is the one that lasts long after the first impression.
As her father, naturally I see my daughter as beautiful.
But if that was all I had to say about her, there wouldn’t be much of a song here.
I wanted the heart included too.
THE PAST AND THE FUTURE
One of the more unusual lines says:
“She can recover the past by the coming of her future”
I like the idea behind that because none of us can literally recover yesterday.
The past happened.
You cannot reach backwards and change it.
What you can do is refuse to let yesterday decide everything that happens tomorrow.
The future gives us another opportunity.
Another relationship.
Another decision.
Another direction.
Another version of ourselves.
I don’t believe the future erases the past. I think that would be too easy.
But the future can change what the past eventually means to us.
Something that once looked like the end of the world can become one chapter in a much longer life.
That is the kind of strength I wanted inside Joleyah’s character.
AND THEN THERE IS THE BEE’S ASS
I could have left everything beautiful and serious.
Apparently I wasn’t capable of doing that.
“You know she is as bright as the sun so think fast
Because she’s as sharp as a bees ass”
There it is.
That’s me.
I like having lines like that because real conversations aren’t perfectly polished.
Families aren’t perfectly polished either.
Sometimes you’re talking seriously and somebody says something ridiculous that makes everybody laugh.
I didn’t want JOLEYAH’S HEART to become so sentimental that Joleyah stopped sounding like a real person and started sounding like a greeting card.
She’s smart.
I wanted to say it.
I just found my own way of getting there.
“SHE KNOWS MORE THAN SHE LETS OUT”
That line says something different from simply calling her intelligent.
There are people who need everybody in the room to know how smart they are.
Then there are people who watch.
Listen.
Notice.
They don’t necessarily tell you everything they’re thinking.
That can make them easy to underestimate.
I follow that line immediately with:
“SHE’S SMART”
There is no metaphor there.
No mystery.
I wanted it stated.
Don’t mistake quiet observation for not understanding what is happening.
Don’t mistake politeness for weakness.
And don’t mistake somebody choosing not to say something for somebody having nothing to say.
NOT EVERYBODY’S THING
One of my favourite honest moments comes later:
“She’s not everybody’s thing & you can think what you want.”
That’s life.
Nobody is everybody’s thing.
I’m certainly not.
And I don’t think we should spend our lives trying to become acceptable to every person we meet.
Some people will understand you.
Some won’t.
Some will like you.
Some won’t.
Some personalities naturally fit together and others don’t.
There is freedom in accepting that.
The important part is not becoming somebody else every time another person disapproves of who you are.
That brings the song straight back to its beginning.
“She is who she is.”
The song starts there because everything else depends on it.
ROCK ’N’ ROLL OR DANCE SLOW
I wanted life in this portrait too.
“When you ask her to dance, she will rock ‘n’ roll,
or she will dance slow.”
I like that image because it lets her move.
Until then, much of the song talks about character, intelligence, control and independence.
Now we’re seeing somebody enjoying herself.
“She will sit eat laugh and drink All night.”
There is nothing complicated about that.
Sometimes living is sitting around a table.
Eating.
Laughing.
Talking.
Having a drink.
Enjoying the people around you.
Those ordinary moments become some of the memories we keep the longest.
A FAMILY SONG WITHOUT TURNING IT INTO A FAMILY ALBUM
There are other family stories in my life.
There are other songs.
There are words such as “Mom and Dad I Love You So” that belong to that larger family picture.
But I don’t want to drag every family memory into JOLEYAH’S HEART simply because Joleyah is my daughter.
That would weaken this song instead of strengthening it.
Every person deserves their own chapter.
This one is hers.
As the MOITA Library grows, those chapters can sit beside each other.
Parents.
Children.
Love.
Loss.
Memories.
Different generations.
Different moments.
Eventually somebody may be able to move through those songs and see pieces of one family across time.
That is much more meaningful to me than trying to squeeze the entire family history into one page.
WHAT I WANTED HER TO HAVE
There is something else behind this song that probably matters more to me as her father than any individual lyric.
I wanted Joleyah to have something permanent from me.
Songs can do that.
Long after the day they were written, the words are still there.
Long after a conversation has been forgotten, a song can bring it back.
JOLEYAH’S HEART tells my daughter something without me having to sit across from her and make some giant speech.
I see your strength.
I see your intelligence.
I see your independence.
I see your beauty.
I see your heart.
I see that you are your own person.
And yes, I am still your father.
There is pride in that.
There is probably some fatherly warning in there too.
But more than anything, there is recognition.
She is who she is.
That is how the song begins.
And that is exactly where its story belongs.

SECTION THREE
THE LYRIC JOURNEY
“She is who she is”
That is where I chose to begin because everything that follows depends on those five words.
There is no apology in them.
No request for approval.
No suggestion that Joleyah needs to become somebody else before she deserves respect.
She is who she is.
As her father, I have watched her become her own person. That doesn’t mean I have to agree with every decision she has ever made, and it doesn’t mean she has to agree with every decision I have made. That’s part of becoming an adult. Eventually the relationship changes. A parent remains a parent, but the child becomes somebody capable of standing on their own.
That is the woman I am introducing.
“She will make you feel important or the misfit you are”
There are two sides to that line.
If she respects you and you belong in her life, she can make you feel that.
But if something isn’t right, don’t assume she isn’t noticing.
I wasn’t trying to describe cruelty. I was describing perception.
Some people can walk into a room and take everybody at face value. Others start reading the room almost immediately.
Joleyah watches.
She notices.
And that leads directly into the next thought.
“She will use her words wisely
& leave you in aw”
Words can do a lot without being loud.
I’ve written hundreds of songs, so obviously I believe in the power of words. The right sentence at the right moment can make somebody laugh, stop them cold, change an argument or make them think differently.
With Joleyah, I wanted the words to be part of her strength.
She doesn’t always need the loudest voice in the room.
Sometimes knowing what to say is enough.
“Don’t drop your guard
she will see right through you”
Now the warning becomes clearer.
Don’t bullshit her.
That’s probably the simplest way I can put it.
If you’re pretending to be something you’re not, eventually the act has to survive somebody paying attention.
That is harder than people think.
You can control what you say.
You can control how you dress.
You can control the first impression.
But over time, character starts leaking through.
The little inconsistencies show up.
The stories don’t quite match.
Actions begin contradicting words.
That’s where “she will see right through you” comes from.
“She is a woman when she needs to be
She is a lady when the mood is right”
I deliberately put woman and lady beside each other.
I wasn’t creating rules for women.
I wasn’t saying one is better than the other.
I was showing range.
There are moments when strength is needed.
There are moments for grace.
There are moments to stand your ground.
There are moments to relax.
There are moments to be serious and moments to have fun.
Joleyah doesn’t have to choose one version of herself and perform it for everybody.
“She has finesse so be polite”
Finesse is a good word here because it isn’t about brute force.
It is knowing how to handle yourself.
There is confidence in that.
And then I add something very basic:
Be polite.
Sometimes we make relationships more complicated than they need to be.
Respect matters.
Manners matter.
How you speak to somebody matters.
How you treat somebody when you think there is nothing to gain from them probably tells more about you than how you behave when you’re trying to impress them.
“Don’t take advantage of her or she’ll tare your part
So don’t mess with JOLEYAH’S HEART”
There’s the first arrival at the title.
The wording is rough and direct because the warning is rough and direct.
Don’t take somebody’s affection as permission to use them.
Don’t mistake kindness for an unlimited supply.
Don’t assume somebody will keep forgiving the same disrespect simply because they care about you.
And remember whose heart we’re talking about.
Hers.
Not mine.
I may be the father writing the warning, but Joleyah is the one deciding who belongs in her life.
Then the song changes.
“She said babe
when I am with you, I’m all yours
But when I am without you
I am all mine”
This is one of the landmarks of the entire song.
The voice becomes more personal.
Now we’re hearing the principle behind the woman I’ve just described.
There is commitment in “I’m all yours.”
But there is independence in “I am all mine.”
Those two thoughts don’t have to fight each other.
A healthy relationship should leave room for both.
You can love somebody deeply and still have your own identity.
Your own friends.
Your own thoughts.
Your own interests.
Your own time.
Your own voice.
Your own life.
Love should add somebody to who you are, not erase who you were.
That is why “I am all mine” matters so much to me.
“She is right as rain, so think again”
I like expressions that have been around forever because sometimes they say something complicated very simply.
Here it carries confidence.
Before you assume you’ve figured her out, think again.
Before you underestimate her, think again.
Before you decide what role she is supposed to play, think again.
“She’s everything that makes a woman a lady
She’s everything that makes a lady a woman she’s strong”
Again, I am moving between those two ideas.
Strength does not cancel grace.
Grace does not cancel strength.
I don’t see femininity as weakness, and I don’t see strength as something that makes somebody less feminine.
Both can exist in the same person.
“She can recover the past by the coming of her future”
Nobody literally recovers the past.
I know that.
The line is about what happens when the future begins changing the weight of yesterday.
We all carry things forward.
Good memories.
Bad decisions.
Disappointments.
People.
Lessons.
Things we wish had happened differently.
The future cannot go backwards and erase them.
But what happens next can change what place those experiences occupy in our lives.
Sometimes the answer to a bad chapter is not rewriting it.
It is writing a better chapter after it.
“Beauty in her life comes in two forms beauty with the eyes & beauty from the heart”
This is another major point in the song.
There is the beauty people see immediately.
Then there is the beauty they have to discover.
The first can get somebody’s attention.
The second determines whether there is actually something worth staying for.
Character doesn’t always announce itself in the first five minutes.
It shows up over time.
In kindness.
In loyalty.
In humour.
In strength.
In how somebody treats people.
In how they respond when life isn’t going their way.
As her father, I wanted both forms recognized.
“You know she is as bright as the sun so think fast
Because she’s as sharp as a bees ass”
And there goes the beautiful poetry.
That’s intentional.
I could have stayed with the sun and written another elegant comparison.
Instead, I went straight to a bee’s ass.
Why?
Because the song needed some personality.
I wasn’t writing a statue.
I was writing about my daughter.
Families laugh.
People say ridiculous things.
Sometimes the line you remember isn’t the sophisticated one. It’s the one that catches you completely off guard.
The important word underneath the joke is “sharp.”
Quick.
Alert.
Intelligent.
Which leads exactly where I wanted it to go.
“She knows more than she lets out
SHE’S SMART”
There is no reason to decorate that final statement.
SHE’S SMART.
That’s it.
I wanted those words standing there.
There is also a difference between knowing things and constantly needing everybody to know that you know them.
Sometimes intelligence listens.
Sometimes it waits.
Sometimes it lets somebody keep talking.
That can be interesting because people reveal an awful lot when they think nobody has figured them out.
“So don’t mess with
JOLEYAH’S HEART”
Now the title returns with more meaning behind it.
The first time we heard it, it sounded like a warning.
Now we’ve learned more about the person behind the heart.
That matters because a heart isn’t something floating by itself.
It belongs to somebody with intelligence, boundaries, independence and a future.
Then I bring us back.
“She is who she is.”
The repetition is important.
We have travelled through an entire section of the song and returned to the opening statement.
She hasn’t changed herself to satisfy what came before.
She’s still who she is.
“She’s in full control,
She won’t let you control her role.”
Now independence becomes explicit.
Nobody else gets to write her part for her.
That doesn’t mean nobody can influence her. Every one of us is influenced by people we love, respect and trust.
Control is different.
A relationship should not require one person to shrink so the other person can feel bigger.
“She makes her stand,
she holds the upper hand. She has the powers, she doesn’t need you.”
That last part could easily be misunderstood if separated from the rest of the song.
“She doesn’t need you” doesn’t mean she cannot love you.
Need and choice are different things.
There is something powerful about somebody staying because they choose you rather than because they cannot survive without you.
I would rather my daughter build relationships from choice than dependency.
“She’s a woman when she needs to be.
She’s a lady when the mood is right.
She has finesse, so be polite.”
The familiar lines return, but the verse has changed what surrounds them.
Now we’ve seen control.
We’ve seen independence.
We’ve seen her making her stand.
So finesse no longer sounds like simple elegance.
It becomes another kind of strength.
“Don’t take advantage of her or she’ll tare you a part.
So don’t mess with JOLEYAH’S HEART.”
Again, the boundary.
Again, the title.
Again, the reminder that affection should never become an opportunity for somebody else to take advantage.
Then we return to the heart of the chorus.
“She said babe
when I am with you, I’m all yours
But when I am without you
I am all mine”
It means more the second time because we’ve just heard:
“She won’t let you control her role.”
Those ideas belong together.
Love me.
Stand beside me.
Share your life with me.
But don’t confuse partnership with possession.
“She is right as rain, so think again”
The confidence returns.
“She’s everything that makes a woman a lady
She’s everything that makes a lady a woman she’s strong”
The song keeps refusing to separate strength from femininity.
“She can recover the past by the coming of her future”
And again, the song points forward.
That is important.
The past is part of us, but life cannot be lived facing backwards forever.
“Beauty in her life comes in two forms beauty with the eyes & beauty from the heart”
Again, appearance and character stand beside each other.
“You know she is as bright as the sun, so think fast
Because she’s as sharp as a bees ass
She knows more than she lets out
SHE’S SMART”
The humour comes back.
The intelligence comes back.
And the warning comes back.
“So don’t mess with JOLEYAH’S HEART”
By now, we know why.
But the song isn’t finished showing us who she is.
“She is who she is,
She’s not everybody’s thing & you can think what you want.”
I love the honesty of this part.
She’s not everybody’s thing.
Neither am I.
Neither are you.
Nobody is.
Trying to be liked by everybody can become its own prison because eventually you have to keep changing depending on who is standing in front of you.
There is a freedom in accepting that some people simply won’t connect with you.
They are allowed.
You are also allowed to continue being yourself.
That brings us right back to:
“She is who she is.”
“She’s a lady with grace,
so control your pace.”
Now the song slows itself down a little.
Don’t rush her.
Don’t assume.
Don’t push.
Let things happen at the pace they are supposed to happen.
“When you ask her to dance, she will rock ‘n’ roll,
or she will dance slow.”
This is one of the places where I wanted the portrait to breathe.
We have spent a lot of time talking about strength and independence.
Now she’s dancing.
And even here, there are two sides.
Rock ’n’ roll.
Or dance slow.
She doesn’t have to live at one speed.
“She will sit eat laugh and drink All night.”
This may be one of the most ordinary lines in the song.
That’s exactly why I like it.
Life isn’t made entirely from giant moments.
A lot of our best memories are built around tables.
Food.
Conversation.
Laughter.
People staying longer than they planned because nobody wants the night to end yet.
That is life too.
“She’s a woman when she wants to be.
She’s a lady when the mood is right.
She has finesse so be polite.”
Notice the small shift.
Earlier I wrote:
“She is a woman when she needs to be.”
Here:
“She’s a woman when she wants to be.”
Need becomes choice.
That fits where the song has travelled.
“Don’t take a vantage of her or she will tare you apart. Don’t mess with
JOLEYAH’S HEART.”
The warning arrives for the final time before the last chorus.
By now, I don’t think it sounds like a father threatening somebody.
At least that isn’t what I intended.
The whole song has shown us a woman capable of protecting her own boundaries.
The warning belongs as much to her as it does to me.
And then the final movement begins.
“She said babe
when I am with you, I’m all yours
But when I am without you
I am all mine”
We end by returning to the statement that carries the song’s central idea.
Love without ownership.
Commitment without losing yourself.
Together when together.
Your own person when apart.
“She is right as rain, so think again
She’s everything that makes a woman a lady
She’s everything that makes a lady a woman she’s strong”
The song is gathering everything together now.
Identity.
Womanhood.
Grace.
Strength.
“She can recover the past by the coming of her future”
The future remains open.
That is where I want it.
I don’t want my daughter defined only by yesterday.
I want her future capable of becoming larger than anything behind her.
“Beauty in her life comes in two forms beauty with the eyes & beauty from the heart”
The final chorus again brings us beyond appearance.
Whatever changes with age, time and life, character remains the deeper measure.
“You know she is as bright as the sun, so think fast
Because she’s as sharp as a bees ass”
One last bit of humour.
Because this is still us.
This is still family.
And I wasn’t going to suddenly become Shakespeare at the finish line.
“She knows more than she lets out”
One final warning not to underestimate her.
“SHE’S SMART”
One final statement from her father.
No qualification.
No explanation needed.
“So don’t mess with JOLEYAH’S HEART”
And that’s where the journey ends.
Not with me claiming ownership over my daughter’s heart.
With me recognizing that it belongs to her.
That distinction is the reason the song means what it means to me.
I can love her.
I can worry about her.
I can be proud of her.
I can give advice she may or may not want.
I can write a song with a father’s warning tucked inside it.
But I cannot live her life for her.
Joleyah’s heart is Joleyah’s.
Her choices are hers.
Her future is hers.
And after walking from the first lyric to the last, we arrive exactly where we began.
She is who she is.

SECTION FOUR
REFLECTION

WHAT REMAINS WITH ME
When I get to the end of JOLEYAH’S HEART, what remains with me isn’t really the warning in the title.
It’s pride.
This is my daughter.
I wanted to put something into words about the woman I see when I look at her. Her independence. Her intelligence. Her humour. Her strength. Her grace. Her ability to decide for herself who she wants in her life and what kind of life she wants to build.
As a father, there is something emotional about recognizing that your child has become their own person.
You spend those early years protecting them, teaching them and trying to point them in the right direction.
Then eventually you realize they have their own compass.
Sometimes they will follow the road you would have chosen.
Sometimes they won’t.
That’s life.
The job was never supposed to be creating another version of me.
The job was helping another human being become themselves.
And Joleyah is herself.
THE HEART BELONGS TO HER
The title could sound possessive if you only saw the words JOLEYAH’S HEART and knew a father wrote the song.
But after travelling through the lyrics, I hope the opposite becomes clear.
Her heart belongs to her.
That may be the most important thought I can leave behind.
Parents can become protective. Fathers can certainly become protective of their daughters. There is nothing unusual about that.
But protection and ownership are not the same thing.
I don’t get to choose every person Joleyah loves.
I don’t get to decide every friendship.
I don’t get to make every decision.
I don’t get to prevent every disappointment.
And I certainly can’t promise that nobody will ever hurt her.
No parent can.
What I can hope is that she knows herself well enough not to surrender herself simply to keep somebody else.
That is why these words carry so much of the song:
“When I am with you, I’m all yours
But when I am without you
I am all mine”
There is a lesson there that reaches beyond Joleyah.
You can belong with somebody without belonging to somebody.
There is a difference.
THE PEOPLE WE LOVE WILL SOMETIMES GET HURT
I would love to say that being strong protects somebody from pain.
It doesn’t.
Smart people get hurt.
Independent people get hurt.
Good people get hurt.
People with strong boundaries still make mistakes.
People misjudge others.
Relationships fail.
Trust gets broken.
Life doesn’t hand out immunity because somebody has good character.
That isn’t what strength means.
Strength is also what happens afterward.
The song contains that thought:
“She can recover the past by the coming of her future”
You cannot undo everything.
Sometimes recovery means accepting that something happened and refusing to let it own everything that comes next.
As a parent, that can be difficult to watch.
You naturally want to fix things.
Sometimes you can’t.
Sometimes the best thing you can do is remain there while your child fixes things for themselves.
BEAUTY CHANGES
There is another reason I am glad I put both kinds of beauty into this song.
We live in a world that can spend an incredible amount of attention on appearance.
But time doesn’t negotiate.
Everybody gets older.
Faces change.
Bodies change.
Life leaves marks.
If our entire value depends on what somebody sees from across the room, we haven’t left ourselves much to work with.
Beauty from the heart is different.
Kindness can grow.
Wisdom can grow.
Character can grow.
Humour can grow.
Understanding can grow.
Strength can grow.
The person somebody becomes can be far more beautiful than the person people first noticed.
That’s something I hope Joleyah always remembers.
BEING STRONG DOESN’T MEAN STANDING ALONE
There is one thing I don’t want misunderstood.
This song celebrates independence, but independence doesn’t mean refusing to need anybody for anything.
Human beings need one another.
Family matters.
Friendship matters.
Love matters.
Being able to say “I am all mine” doesn’t mean building walls around yourself.
It means knowing who you are when the other person isn’t standing there.
There is strength in being independent.
There is also strength in trusting the right people.
Knowing the difference may be one of the hardest lessons any of us learn.
A FATHER CAN ONLY DO SO MUCH
There comes a point when advice becomes exactly that.
Advice.
Your children have to decide what to do with it.
I can tell Joleyah what I think.
She can listen.
She can disagree.
She can tell me I’m wrong.
She can make her own decision.
And sometimes she might discover Dad knew what he was talking about.
I reserve the right to enjoy those moments.
But sometimes she will be right and I’ll be the one who has to reconsider.
That’s part of having an adult relationship with your children.
Respect has to travel both directions.
If I want her to respect my experience, I also have to respect her ability to build experience of her own.
THERE IS MORE THAN ONE KIND OF FAMILY SONG
A family song doesn’t always have to be slow music with everybody crying by the end.
Sometimes love sounds like:
“Because she’s as sharp as a bees ass.”
That’s family too.
I wanted JOLEYAH’S HEART to have affection without drowning in sentimentality.
I wanted some attitude.
I wanted some laughter.
I wanted the person to remain visible underneath the emotion.
There are other family songs and other family stories that belong elsewhere in the MOITA Library. As those pages grow, they will create a larger picture.
This one doesn’t have to carry all of that weight.
This one has one job.
Preserve something about my daughter.
WHAT I HOPE JOLEYAH HEARS
If Joleyah comes back to this song years from now, I hope she hears more than a title with her name in it.
I hope she hears that her father saw her.
Not as perfect.
Not as somebody who needed to become what I wanted.
As herself.
I hope she hears the pride underneath the jokes.
The respect underneath the warnings.
The love underneath all that talk about strength.
And I hope she knows that when I wrote about her heart, I understood something important.
It was never mine to control.
I was lucky enough to be her father.
There is a difference.
WHAT I HOPE YOU TAKE WITH YOU
You may not have a daughter.
You may be somebody’s daughter.
You may be a son, a mother, a father, a partner, or somebody trying to figure out where you belong in another person’s life.
The details change.
The principle doesn’t.
Love people without erasing them.
Respect their independence.
Don’t mistake affection for ownership.
Don’t take someone’s heart for granted simply because they trusted you enough to put it in your hands.
And if you’re the person giving your heart away, keep something important.
Yourself.
Maybe that is the simplest lesson inside this entire song.
Be capable of loving somebody completely without forgetting who you are when you’re standing alone.
Joleyah gave me the reason to write this song.
Being her father gave me the perspective.
And MOITA gives me somewhere permanent to preserve it.
Years from now, when today has become part of the past, this chapter will still say what I wanted it to say.
My daughter is strong.
My daughter is smart.
My daughter has her own mind.
My daughter has her own future.
And her father loves her for exactly who she is.
She is who she is.
I wouldn’t want this song to end any other way.

MOITA
WHERE EVERY SONG TELLS A STORY
EVERY STORY TEACHES SOMETHING

SECTION FIVE
MOITA DOCUMENTARY & LEARNING CENTRE
THE WORLD SURROUNDING JOLEYAH’S HEART

JOLEYAH’S HEART began with my daughter.
But some of the ideas inside the song belong to a much larger conversation.
Independence.
Identity.
Respect.
Boundaries.
Relationships.
Parents learning to recognize their children as adults.
The difference between loving somebody and controlling somebody.
And the importance of remaining yourself while sharing your life with another person.
Those subjects deserve a little more room.
Not because Joleyah needs to become an example for everybody else.
She doesn’t.
Her story is hers.
But sometimes one person’s story opens a door into questions that almost every family eventually faces.

WHEN A CHILD BECOMES AN ADULT
There isn’t one morning when a parent wakes up and suddenly thinks:
Well, that’s it. My child is completely grown up now.
It happens gradually.
Children begin making more decisions.
They develop their own beliefs.
Their friendships become their own.
Eventually their romantic relationships are their own.
Their work becomes their own.
Their money becomes their own responsibility.
Their mistakes become theirs too.
That transition can be difficult on both sides.
A parent may still see the child they protected years earlier.
The adult child may be thinking:
I love you, but this is my life.
Both feelings can exist at the same time.
A strong adult relationship between parents and children requires something different from the relationship they had when the child was ten years old.
There has to be room for adulthood.
That includes the possibility of disagreement.

LOVE AND INDIVIDUALITY
One of the strongest ideas in JOLEYAH’S HEART is:
“When I am with you, I’m all yours
But when I am without you
I am all mine”
There is an important real-world principle behind that idea.
Healthy relationships leave room for individuality.
The Government of Canada’s educational material on healthy relationships identifies mutual respect, trust, open communication, conflict resolution and individuality among their important characteristics. It describes individuality as partners remaining unique people who can pursue their own goals, friendships, interests and hobbies.
That matters.
A relationship doesn’t have to erase two individuals in order to create a couple.
There can still be:
My interests.
Your interests.
My friends.
Your friends.
My time.
Your time.
And then:
Our interests.
Our friends.
Our time.
Togetherness and individuality don’t have to be enemies.
Sometimes respecting the individual actually strengthens the relationship.

BOUNDARIES ARE NOT PUNISHMENT
The word “boundary” sometimes sounds negative.
It can sound like somebody putting up a wall.
But a healthy boundary isn’t supposed to be punishment.
It tells another person what somebody is comfortable with, what they aren’t comfortable with and where their limits are.
Boundaries can involve physical contact, emotions, privacy, personal time, finances, digital life and many other parts of a relationship. Canadian educational resources describe healthy relationships as including boundaries alongside respect, communication, trust, consent, support and equality.
That connects directly with the independence running through JOLEYAH’S HEART.
“She won’t let you control her role.”
There is a difference between somebody expressing a boundary and somebody trying to control another person.
A boundary says:
This is what I am comfortable with.
Control says:
This is what you are allowed to do because I said so.
Those aren’t the same thing.

LOVE IS NOT OWNERSHIP
People sometimes use possessive language affectionately.
“My girl.”
“My man.”
“My wife.”
“My husband.”
Most of the time nobody means they literally own another human being.
But underneath that language is something worth remembering.
Nobody becomes property because they enter a relationship.
The Government of Canada describes a healthy relationship as one where a person can make their own choices without being manipulated, controlled or forced.
That is almost exactly the territory I was exploring when I wrote:
“She’s in full control,
She won’t let you control her role.”
There should be compromise in relationships.
There should be consideration.
There should be times when one person changes plans because something matters to the other.
That’s part of sharing a life.
But compromise isn’t surrendering your identity.

RESPECT GOES BOTH WAYS
It is easy to talk about what we expect from other people.
Respect me.
Listen to me.
Understand me.
Give me space.
Trust me.
But healthy relationships require us to turn those sentences around.
Do I respect you?
Do I listen to you?
Do I try to understand you?
Do I give you reasonable space?
Do I behave in ways that deserve your trust?
Mutual respect matters precisely because it is mutual.
That doesn’t mean two people will always agree.
They won’t.
Disagreement itself isn’t proof that something is wrong.
How people handle disagreement tells us much more.
Can they talk?
Can they listen?
Can they disagree without humiliation?
Can somebody admit they were wrong?
Can they find compromises without one person always surrendering?
Those are harder questions.

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN STRENGTH AND ISOLATION
JOLEYAH’S HEART repeatedly celebrates strength.
But strength shouldn’t be confused with never needing anybody.
There is nothing weak about asking for help.
Nothing weak about loving somebody.
Nothing weak about trusting somebody who has earned that trust.
Nothing weak about allowing family and friends to support you.
Real independence isn’t necessarily:
I need nobody.
Sometimes it is:
I know who I am, and I choose who I allow beside me.
That is a very different statement.

WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE A LADY?
The song repeatedly moves between “woman” and “lady.”
That raises an interesting cultural question.
What exactly is a lady?
Different generations may answer differently.
Historically, the word has carried ideas involving social position, manners, behaviour, appearance and expectations placed upon women.
But language changes.
Culture changes.
Expectations change.
I wasn’t trying to write a universal definition.
When I use “lady” in this song, I am talking about grace and finesse.
But I deliberately place those qualities beside strength.
A woman doesn’t have to choose between them.
She can be graceful and forceful.
Funny and serious.
Independent and loving.
Elegant one evening and rocking out the next.
Human beings don’t fit comfortably into one little box.
Thankfully.

BEAUTY WITH THE EYES AND BEAUTY FROM THE HEART
Physical attraction is real.
There is no point pretending people don’t notice appearance.
But appearance gives us very limited information about another human being.
Character requires time.
You discover it through behaviour.
How does somebody treat people when there is nothing to gain?
How do they behave when they’re angry?
How do they handle responsibility?
How do they treat somebody who disagrees with them?
Can they apologize?
Can they forgive?
Can they laugh at themselves?
Can they keep somebody’s confidence?
Do their actions eventually match their words?
That is the beauty from the heart I was writing about.
It cannot always be photographed.
But it can certainly be experienced.

THE RIGHT TO CHANGE
“She can recover the past by the coming of her future.”
That lyric opens another important door.
Human beings change.
Sometimes slowly.
Sometimes dramatically.
A bad decision does not automatically predict every decision afterward.
A failed relationship doesn’t automatically predict the next one.
A difficult period doesn’t automatically define an entire life.
None of this means pretending the past never happened.
Consequences are real.
Memories are real.
Lessons are real.
Sometimes damage cannot simply be undone.
But people can learn.
They can mature.
They can make different choices.
They can become better at recognizing patterns that once hurt them.
The future cannot rewrite yesterday.
It can write something different tomorrow.

WHAT PARENTS EVENTUALLY HAVE TO ACCEPT
Parents spend years teaching children to become independent.
Then independence arrives.
And sometimes parents discover that independence includes:
“No.”
“I disagree.”
“I’ve decided.”
“I don’t want that.”
“I’ll handle it.”
That can be a strange reward for doing the job properly.
But there is something good inside it.
Your child has a voice.
They are using it.
The relationship now has to grow too.
Advice may still matter enormously.
Experience matters.
Family history matters.
But adulthood changes the conversation.
Maybe sometimes the parent speaks.
Maybe sometimes the daughter speaks.
Maybe sometimes both need to shut up for a minute and listen.
That probably applies to more families than anybody wants to admit.
THE QUESTION I WOULD LEAVE WITH PARENTS
What are we actually trying to raise?
Children who obey us forever?
Or adults capable of thinking for themselves?
Those goals eventually conflict.
If the goal is independence, there will come a day when your child uses that independence in a way you wouldn’t have chosen.
That doesn’t automatically mean you failed.
It may mean they understood the lesson better than you expected.

THE QUESTION I WOULD LEAVE WITH DAUGHTERS AND SONS
Being independent doesn’t mean refusing every piece of advice simply because it came from your parents.
Sometimes experience knows something youth hasn’t encountered yet.
Sometimes parents are wrong.
Sometimes children are wrong.
Sometimes everybody is partly right and communicating terribly.
Growing up doesn’t require throwing away every lesson that came before.
It means deciding what belongs in the person you’re becoming.

THE QUESTION I WOULD LEAVE WITH COUPLES
Can the person beside you still be themselves?
Can you?
That’s worth thinking about.
If somebody has to become smaller to keep the relationship together, something deserves examination.
If friendships disappear because one partner won’t tolerate them, something deserves examination.
If somebody becomes afraid to disagree, something deserves examination.
If privacy becomes impossible because “trust” is being used as an excuse for monitoring or control, something deserves examination.
Healthy relationships are generally associated with respect, communication, trust, consent, support, boundaries and equality; controlling behaviour, manipulation and isolation are warning signs of unhealthy relationships.
A relationship should give two people somewhere to grow.
Not somewhere one person disappears.

WHY THIS BELONGS BESIDE JOLEYAH’S HEART
I didn’t sit down to write an educational manual about relationships.
I wrote about my daughter.
But that’s what I like about songs.
A few words can open something much larger.
“She is who she is” opens identity.
“I am all mine” opens independence.
“She won’t let you control her role” opens boundaries.
“Beauty from the heart” opens character.
“She can recover the past by the coming of her future” opens resilience and growth.
And “don’t mess with JOLEYAH’S HEART” eventually becomes something bigger than a father’s warning.
Respect the heart somebody trusts you with.
That is worth learning whether your name is Joleyah or not.
CONTINUE EXPLORING
For readers who want to continue beyond this page, the Government of Canada’s material on safe dates and healthy relationships provides information about respect, trust, communication, individuality and personal boundaries.
Government of Canada — Safe Dates and Healthy Relationships⁠
The Government of Canada also provides a broader learning module examining healthy relationships, boundaries, individuality, communication and related questions.
Government of Canada — Gender-Based Violence and Healthy Relationships Learning Module⁠
If this subject interests you, continue exploring healthy boundaries, communication between parents and adult children, individuality within relationships, emotional independence, mutual respect and how relationships change across different stages of life.
One song doesn’t answer all those questions.
It doesn’t have to.
Sometimes its job is simply to make us start asking them.

JOLEYAH’S HEART started with my daughter.
The Learning Centre ends somewhere much wider:
How do we love another person deeply while still allowing them to remain completely themselves?
That’s a question worth carrying beyond the song.

MOITA