"All of Me Wants All of You" (Helado Negro Remix) by Sufjan Stevens, Sunday, February 27, 2022
I've talked about how Carrie & Lowell, Sufjan Steven's 2015 masterpiece, is a quintessential portrait of dealing with grief and forgiveness when I wrote about the first two tracks, "Death with Dignity," and "Should Have Known Better." By the third track on the record, "All of Me Wants All of You," explores grief in a different way from the previous two tracks. As with most songs on the album, "All of Me" appears to be deeply personal to the artist. But being personal doesn't stop this track's language from being the most obscured with allusions to geography and possibly an allegory from a little-known Spanish play.
ALL OF ME THINKS LESS OF YOU. There's a debate on Lyrics Genius about the meaning of this song, especially surrounding the identity of the only other character mentioned by name in this song, Manelich. Is he the one the song is about? Stevens has written vaguely about homosexual attraction throughout his discography; however, the Christian imagery he uses in his songs have certain listeners saying that the perceived homosexual elements in his music are just elaborate metaphors for Christian allegories. Another interpretation is that song is written from another point of view and that Manelich is Sufjan himself, and he's referencing a 1896 Catalan play Terra Baixa (Marta of the Lowlands), which was made into a film in 1914. In the play, goatherd Manelich is duped into marrying his master's daughter, Marta, who was abused by her father. This may account for the exasperated line "Manelich, I feel so used," as Manelich was used in the master's twisted plot.
YOU CHECKED YOUR MESSAGES WHILE I MASTURBATED. As one Genius commenter points out, this debate between whether the song is queer or Christian misses the point. Straight or queer, the relationship described in the song seems to fit into what Stevens said in an interview with Pitchfork in 2015. Stevens said, "In lieu of her death, I felt a desire to be with her, so I felt like abusing drugs and alcohol and fucking around a lot and becoming reckless and hazardous was my way of being intimate with her." "All of Me" shows the singer in an unhealthy relationship or pattern of relationships he can't fully commit to, but he wants to at times. Stevens' grief and self-destruction was unlike anything the singer had done before. Essentially, while his mother was dying, the singer was in his most avant-garde phase with The Age of Adz. A Sufjan Stevens fan podcast called this extravagant tour with all of its costumes and synthesizers a "masturbatory period" in Stevens' musical career, and possibly his personal life, too. Today's song helps us to realize that grief can look strange. In our grief we can hurt other people and make horrible choices, romantic or otherwise in our grief. But ultimately, we just want Manelich to hold us and wipe away our tears. Is he capable of that, though?
Carrie & Lowell Tour Live version:
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