You can thank a former UWEC professor for this.

Wordsmith Will Jennings is familiar with a thing called "love."

In case you weren’t aware, Eau Claire has a connection with one of the (mighty) finest songwriters of our time. Will Jennings – nomination-getter and winner of multiple Grammies, Academy Awards, and Golden Globes –  may have only taught at UW-Eau Claire for three years, but hey, he’s still one of our own, right? Working with popular artists like Barry Manilow, Whitney Houston, Jimmy Buffet, B.B. King, Mariah Carey, Steve Winwood, and Eric Clapton, Jennings left his musical fingerprints all over the music and film scenes of the '80s and '90s. If you’ve never heard of him, you’re probably familiar with some of his hits like, “Higher love,” “Tears in Heaven,” and a little Celine Dion ditty called “My Heart will Go On." In fact, there’re so many hits, one could almost write a love poem* entirely from his lyrics. So I did:

Just Roll With it Baby

Remember how we faced the world,
like two tramps shining
You used to be the best,
I could make the sun shine from pure desire
The way my soul [was] lost in you
Loves so strange,
Playing hide and seek with hearts
[But] Just like the waves down by the shore,
We're gonna keep on coming back for more
The road is long, there are mountains in our way,
But we climb them a step every day
Time is a river rolling into nowhere
So I keep holding on
before the good is gone.

 *Albeit, a highly disjointed and not-so-romantic love poem.