"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.
This is one of my favorite love songs: big, bold, demanding, overwhelming, all-encompassing, so long it almost exhausts itself by the end.
For this week, the song is All I Want Is You by U2.
You say you want
Diamonds on a ring of gold
Your story to remain untold
Your love not to grow cold
It's from 1988, which means I first heard it new, as an eighteen-year old. If there's a better audience for "big, bold, demanding, overwhelming, all-encompassing" love songs than a teenager, I don't know it - I was poised to love big emotions, giant gestures, strong stances. And U2 delivered: their '80s work was always big in all the important ways, and they worked on weaving subtlety in, in fits and starts, as their careers went on.
It has that classic-era Edge guitar sound, supple and rippling, ringing throughout - sounding like nothing and no one else, rising up at the first chorus and rising and falling in the music after that.
It has one of Bono's best vocal performances, relatively subdued, world-weary, straightforward. He always had the vocal power, but didn't always want to rein it in - here, he does, to great effect.
What's it about? All the things lovers tell each other - especially promise each other - the plans they make and the goals they set and the dreams they have, maybe especially the big expansive ones the two do not 100% share.
All the promises we break
From the cradle to the grave
When all I want is you
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