Warren wanted a Beach Boys thing for this one, and Carl Wilson and Billy Hinsche came in, with Carl arranging the vocal parts. The other harmony vocalists (credited as the "Gentlemen Boys") were Jackson Browne, J.D. Souther, Zevon's longtime backers Waddy Wachtel and Jorge Calderon, and Linda Rondstadt/Stone Poneys guitarist Kenny Edwards.
Blind faith, heartache
Mind games, mistakes
My sweet fireball
My sweet rigmarole
I want it all
I want it all
Old dogs, new tricks
Can you feel it?
Space age country girl
Stone cold miracle
I want it all
I want it all
And then suddenly it hit me
It's a year ago
Since I drank miniature whiskey
And we shared your Coke
Said, ain't it just like you to kiss me
And then hit the road?
Leave me listening to the Stones
Two-thousand light years from home
Shoo-wop, shoo-wop, shoo-wop, shoo-wop, shoo-wop, shoo-wop
Shoo-wop, shoo-wop, shoo-wop, shoo-wop, shoo-wop, shoo-wop
Shoo-wop, shoo-wop, shoo-wop, shoo-wop, shoo-wop, shoo-wop
I want it all
I want it all
I want it all
I want it all
Mind games, mistakes
My sweet fireball
My sweet rigmarole
I want it all
I want it all
Old dogs, new tricks
Can you feel it?
Space age country girl
Stone cold miracle
I want it all
I want it all
And then suddenly it hit me
It's a year ago
Since I drank miniature whiskey
And we shared your Coke
Said, ain't it just like you to kiss me
And then hit the road?
Leave me listening to the Stones
Two-thousand light years from home
Shoo-wop, shoo-wop, shoo-wop, shoo-wop, shoo-wop, shoo-wop
Shoo-wop, shoo-wop, shoo-wop, shoo-wop, shoo-wop, shoo-wop
Shoo-wop, shoo-wop, shoo-wop, shoo-wop, shoo-wop, shoo-wop
I want it all
I want it all
I want it all
I want it all
Lyrics submitted by SongMeanings, edited by angelika
I Want It All Lyrics as written by Alex Turner
Lyrics © Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC
Lyrics powered by LyricFind
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He certainly did earn that reputation.
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This song is def a twin to "Unfair" (a song she has been quoted as saying is about falling in love with someone who is already in a relationship) so it is presumably about the same person. Given the references to buying an apartment and not being able to see her love interest "after tonight," it's most likely that she's moving away and she'll "wait a day to break the bad news" (i.e. notifying him that she's leaving once she's already gone).
And, of course, the fact that she sees in him a fellow "idealist" and "dreamer" (terms commonly given to people with the INFP personality on the Myers–Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI)) portends that she'll always be left wondering if they would've been perfect together.
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This is a hauntingly beautiful song about introspection, specifically about looking back at a relationship that started bad and ended so poorly, that the narrator wants to go back to the very beginning and tell himself to not even travel down that road. I believe that the relationship started poorly because of the lines:
"Take me back to the night we met:When the night was full of terrors: And your eyes were filled with tears: When you had not touched me yet"
So, the first night was not a great start, but the narrator pursued the relationship and eventually both overcame the rough start to fall in love with each other:
"I had all and then most of you"
Like many relationships that turn sour, it was not a quick decline, but a gradual one where the narrator and their partner fall out of love and gradually grow apart
"Some and now none of you"
Losing someone who was once everything in your world, who you could confide in, tell your secrets to, share all the most intimate parts of your life, to being strangers with that person is probably one of the most painful experiences a person can go through. So Painful, the narrator wants to go back in time and tell himself to not even pursue the relationship.
This was the perfect song for "13 Reasons Why"
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this song all about desire, don't they?
I think it's about long distance relationship: they can only see each other once in a while and every time it feels like they start from scratch and it is not a reassuring feeling. So he's saying, I want it all different because I'm tired of thinking (in the brief moments that they got together) you will soon leave. And it's hard to be carefree if the time is very limited and probably one is happy even with very little, and the other wants more instead, and he's in a sense a bit annoyed that they don't both want more.
Maybe I'm making it too personal, but (I'm guessing) it's about an unstable relationship and someone you dig who always leaves you hanging.
Clearly the protagonist strongly desires this woman, though I'm not really sure what the precise nature of the relationship between them is meant to be.
It also seems to me like Alex is trying to get across the idea that what the protagonist is asking for and wanting too much, and that he can't possibly get all that he wants. This struck me when I heard the line "Space age country girl"; it sounds like he wants something that can't exist because it's internally contradictory. For example, it could be that he wants her to be both dangerous, unpredictable, and out of reach on the one hand, and stable, dependable, and firmly his on the other. (This reminds me of the fantastic "Do I Wanna Know?", which seems to me to partly be expressing a worry that he might miss the chase if he ever actually gets the girl; he wants to have her, but when he has her he might just wish he could go back to wanting her again.) Then it seems like this is also supported by "Old dogs / New tricks", since the expression is that you can't teach an old dog new tricks, but he still seems to want both the old dog and the new tricks anyway. And then obviously the repeated "I want it all" suggests that he's after far more than he could ever really get. I don't know if Alex actually intended any of that, but that's what it seemed like to me.
Incidentally, the line "Ain't it just like you to kiss me and then hit the road" immediately reminded me of the line "It seems like once again you've had to greet me with goodbye" from "505". I don't know if there was any intended connection there or what it would signify, but I found it interesting anyway :)