Deep Dive: All I Want is You

❤️❤️❤️

The author and his wife in a private moment

Love songs are never easy. They’re slippery things, alway wanting to convey the simplest message and yet forever threatening to tip over into saccharine sentimentality. They want depth and complexity, but not so much that the meaning needs to be scrutinized and unpacked. When they’re great, oh, they’re so great. They speak to us all, they communicate something that is universal, that is universally understood. They raise the hairs on the back of our heads; they set our hearts a-flutter. But when they’re bad — oh, god, save us all. I’d rather write a hundred songs about press gangs and infanticide than a simple, straightforward love song. The risk of failure always feels too great.

Not to say that I haven’t built my career around love songs — they’re all love songs in one form or another, as far as I’m concerned. But this song, “All I Want Is You,” was an entirely different beast. Go ahead and listen to it; we just released it today.

No simple love song wants dissection, but I’ll do it for the sake of science. And my beloved paid subscribers. Read on!