‘Beloved Wife’ was written by Natalie Merchant about devotional love. 

As she said in an interview with Psychology Today,“The death of my grandmother and my grandfather’s dying of a broken heart – it’s sad.  It’s beautiful, but it’s sad.”

“When Pete Seeger’s wife, Toshi, died, they’d been together 47 years. I sang at her memorial, and her memorial went on for five hours.  Every person who took to the stage and stood in front of that microphone said that she had changed their lives,” Merchant said. “When Pete got up at the end to speak, he said, ‘People ask me what my life would have been without Toshi,’ and he said, ‘My life would have been a catastrophe.’ And I sang at that event, and he was sitting five feet away from me — that was an intense experience, too”.