"Better Things" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song I really love, by an artist I haven't featured in the previous This Year or Portions For Foxes series. See the introduction for more.
Some songs are koans, statements, mileposts. They say what they say in a way you immediately agree with, and take to heart, moving around furniture in your head to make room for them, so they can sit in the place they should always have been.
This is one of those songs for me: I Want Everything by Cracker.
The verses are allusive - I don't know what they mean. The singer is somewhere, thinking about someone. And "someone" is a huge question mark - it could be another person, personified nature, a god, nearly anything at all.
But the refrain is what matters most: that title, over and over. In a voice that doesn't demand, doesn't implore, doesn't whine. It just states: this is what it is, this is what I want, this is where I am.
I want everything
He's singing to someone; he's saying this clearly, powerfully, as directly as he can. Again, it depends on who you think he's singing to what it all means - what kind of everything it means he wants - but it works, no matter who you think it is. No matter how much everything includes or doesn't.
And I agree. I want everything. Not to take from anyone else. Not exclusively. Not in any negative way. Just in that sense of openness, of being part of the world: all of it, here and now and later and forever.
I want everything
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