All I Want Is You feels a bit like going to a Bob Dylan concert and seeing Dylan take the stage, bang out a cover of Miley Cyrus’s Wrecking Ball, and start twerking.
It wouldn’t be bad, per se. It might even be awesome. But it would certainly be unexpected.
The Decemberists’ new single is a simple, profound love song. For Colin Meloy and his band, that makes it as unexpected as a twerking Zimmy.
To be fair, Meloy has written plenty of love songs before. Red Right Ankle is a beautiful, bizarre ode to loving a person in their entirety–their every tiny bodily detail, their dreams, and their past.
A Beginning Song ends with the lovely, love-focused outro:
Is the sunlight
Is the shadows
Is the quiet
Is the word
Is the beating heart
Is the ocean
Is the boys
Is you
My sweet love (my sweet love)
Oh, my love (oh my love)
And the light, bright light
It’s all around me
Wonder is an even more direct celebration of Meloy’s family, and the awe (and amusement) he feels in having created a person. And even 12/17/12–a song about the tragedy at Sandy Hook–sneaks in references to Meloy’s wife and “this cannonball in the bosom of your belly.”
Still, all those songs are very Decemberist-y. They’re love songs, yes. But the love is couched in ruminations on death, references to “elbow bones,” questioning of God, and lore about Canadian gypsies.
All I Want Is You is stunning in that it sheds all that, focusing solely and directly on love. The song is both lyrically and musically simple. There’s no hiding behind downtrodden Victorian characters or oblique references to body parts–the love is just there.
Meloy comments on the difficulty and vulnerability of writing such a song in his Machine Shop newsletter. In his words, “Love songs are never easy. They’re slippery things, always wanting to convey the simplest message and yet forever threatening to tip over into saccharine sentimentality.”
The first few times I listened to All I Want Is You, I felt like it veered dangerously close to the latter. Many of the song’s lyrics (“Don’t want pretty poses/Don’t want rows of roses”) are so simple and playful that they almost feel like too much–too forthright, too direct.
An AA rhyme scheme?? Come on!
Even on a first listen, though, Meloy’s musicality makes clear that this song is to be taken seriously.
There’s the multi-part harmonies on lines like “All the United Nations/Couldn’t feed my sensations,” Meloy’s beautifully understated whisper of the lyric “All I want is you” (which would make Murmur-era Michael Stipe proud), his rhythmic and barely decipherable “half as much as how you do,” some Sufjan-esque horn breaks, and that ever-present, picked guitar drone that’s the musical lifeblood of the song.
In short, even before unpacking the lyrics and meaning of the song, there are enough Decemberist-y things to make it clear who wrote this–and to make the skeptical fan listen again. And again.
After several more listens–and some shower singing–I was convinced that this is a great song.
Yes, some of the lyrics and rhyme schemes are (deliberately?) simplistic.
But there’s depth here, too. Lines like “Drag me to your alter/When my footing falters” capture the ways that people–in love for years or decades–reciprocally make each other better, a key Meloy philosophy.
And then there’s just the chutzpah of–after doing things one way for decades–doing it entirely differently.
Meloy says, “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.”
Weirdly, infanticide, characters “carved and rift with wrinkles”, ghostly barrow boys and the like are familiar, easy territory for Meloy and the Decemberists. They’re old hat.
Reinventing himself, in this case, meant ditching all that artifice and going for something simple, honest, and vulnerable. There’s power–and beauty–in that.
After All I Want Is You, Meloy returns to your regularly scheduled Decemberists album with songs like Joan in the Garden, a 19-minute prog rock anthem about Joan of Arc.
Which is good. A whole album of All I Want Is You-s would be too much, too different. But for a brief moment–for one song–it’s nice to see Meloy take the risk of going in a different direction and to succeed.
Dylan probably shouldn’t cover Bangerz in its entirety. But if he chose to twerk to Wrecking Ball now and again? No one would blame him. We might even welcome the change.
