“All of Me” is a song of first crush, first blush. It’s the headlong falling on your knees before somebody else, metaphorically. It’s full-on desire, a bit of anger, abandonment of the body, a ken to be consumed. And it’s not after the first date but the date, the one where everything suddenly matters, everything clicks, the lights in the room seem to brighten or darken, basically orchestrate into a single, very present moment, as if the furniture, food smells, lamp light, the sound of cars all are a background chorus for a moment between you and someone else. And then that someone says goodbye.
I don’t know when I first heard it. I don’t know how I felt that first time listening to it. I haven’t heard it that same way in a very long time, and since none of that influences how I perceive the song today, I will tell you what it does to me now: It fills me with longing. It makes me nostalgic. It’s about falling in love, which I know some people find sentimental, maybe silly, a manufactured thing of our culture’s bent toward romanticism. But as someone who’s been through it, been in it deep, it crushes.
I listen to a lot of Billie Holiday and though Billie Holiday does a lot of things best, this is my favorite song of hers. “All of Me” was written in 1931 by Gerald Marks and Seymour Simons; the goofy 20-bar intro (heard here) is mostly ignored. But Holiday does it like nobody else. Regarding Holiday’s 1941 recording, from Ted Gioia’s The Jazz Standards: A Guide to the Repertoire, “She staked a claim of ownership that no one has managed to dislodge in subsequent years.”
I am (only slightly) embarrassed to admit I’ve requested this song from musicians in clubs, in piano bars, on the street.
Where it started: I was a kid in the sitting room, watching a movie with my parents, a VCR tape we brought home from The Roxy, our local, dark video rental store that no longer exists in a shopping plaza that no longer exists. Oddly, the song started to mean something to me because the movie made me laugh: 1984’s All of Me with Lily Tomlin and Steve Martin.
In the movie, Tomlin is a dying millionaire who’s been trapped her entire life in bed. Martin is a jazz guitarist trapped, you could say, inside the body of a lawyer. Tomlin has a plan to transfer her soul into another woman’s body, then accidentally her soul winds up in Martin’s body, then Martin spends the rest of the movie with Tomlin trapped inside him. It was just the sort of screwball comedy a child like me loved, and though I don’t think I’ve watched it since, I’ve always loved the song.
It is my favorite song to hear sung by Billie Holiday because I can picture her singing it. A lot of her music is painful. Some is joyous. Her life had a lot of both, maybe more the former. I mean, “Strange Fruit” is a fucking nightmare. But I’ll get wrapped up picturing her when I listen to “All of Me” – I see her smiling on stage and I wonder if it’s false, or just a performance. I imagine her perhaps being happy while she sings it in spite of that. It’s hard to listen to Billie Holiday, know about her life, and not wish her happiness, or just escape.
It's the most simple, short song, but so longing, loving, not completely despairing – there’s a chance the lover will return – but a fully felt yearning. It’s a song whose love for the other is unconditional, but their love in response is conditional, for sure, and so it’s love expressed as a wish, a cry at the door.
From Spring, Karl Ove Knaussgaard’s collection of brief essays written to his infant daughter:
“Love is many things, most of its forms are fleeting, linked to everything that happens, everything that comes and goes, everything that fills us at first, then empties us out, but unconditional love is constant, it glows faintly throughout one’s whole life, and I want you to know this – that you too were born into that love, and that it will envelope you, no matter what happens, as long as your mother and I are alive.”
Who doesn’t want to be enveloped by love, no matter what happens?
Some publishing news: A few months ago, an editor at the New York Times Magazine reached out with a weird idea for a story: Would I write for them about what it’s like to be somebody named Rosecrans on Los Angeles’s Rosecrans Avenue?
Very grateful to see it in print this weekend. Here’s the online version.
Also, here are some photos from the latest issue of Travel + Leisure to accompany a new story about contemporary artists working and living in the Joshua Tree region. Always amazing (and a surprise) to get the cover.
In tomorrow’s supplement for supporters:
A soothing YouTube wormhole into antique counting devices
Vivaldi recomposed
Moving thoughts on searching for things unlikely to be found, and more
What the what
Meditations in an Emergency is a weekly dispatch from author Rosecrans Baldwin about something beautiful. Supporters receive a Sunday supplement with three-plus things to love, along with a longer piece once a month sent from the road, for some inbox wanderlust. ⛰️
Books mentioned in Meditations in an Emergency are stored in a Bookshop list.