In case you thought I had a particularly cool or sophisticated musical sensibility, I'm punting on that right off the bat, because after having contemplated the classics, I'm going straight for juvenile turn-of-the-century chick rock. There are going to be songs on this list that I dissect in great detail, in which I'm in awe of the lyrical or musical construction, and which can be held up as objectively good. This is not one of them.
No, I'm starting with this song because, for four years of high school, and at least part of college (and on some subconscious level, probably ever since), I've been desperately in love with Michelle Branch.
"All You Wanted" was the second single off The Spirit Room, which Branch, then 18, released as her major-label debut in August 2001. I have absolutely no idea when or how I encountered this song for the first time--probably on the radio--but it was probably in early 2002, when I was 14 years old and had just gotten an acoustic guitar for Christmas. That means that if this song had come out three or four years later, when my obnoxious male teenaged rockism would've been at its peak, I probably would have sneered at it.
But late in my freshman year of high school, I couldn't get enough of songs that had only four chords in 4/4 that never change tempo or key, because going i-VI-III-VII in E minor was pretty much all I could do on guitar for the first few months I owned the instrument anyway.
It also didn't hurt that Michelle Branch was the first celebrity crush I had who really felt like mine. By that I do not mean like I felt I owned her literally, please do not call the police, but while everyone else was talking about...you know what? I cannot for the life of me name who the Big Teenage It Girl was in 2002. Were Britney Spears and Sarah Michelle Gellar still a thing? Because those were still pre-Lohan years.
Anyway, while it was just kind of accepted that everyone would have a thing for Sarah Michelle Gellar (because she's really hot, you see), I was going on about Michelle Branch, who was not famous because she was hot. I mean, don't get me wrong, she was then and is now quite an attractive woman, but she was famous because she could sing and write, and that was when I was realizing that I could have more nuanced feelings about someone than "is she a girl and does she like me back?" So Michelle Branch was who stood out to me, and if you think that I don't remember exactly where I was and how I felt when I found out that she'd gotten married, you are fooling yourself.
I listened to and played the same four Michelle Branch songs--"All You Wanted," "You Set Me Free," "Everywhere," and "Goodbye to You"--over and over at a time when I was just coming out of a particularly brutal pubescent voice change. I've sung pretty much all my life. My dad was the cantor at the Catholic church we went to when I was little, and when I was 6 or 7 he used to have me sing with him at mass, and I just kept singing until I graduated college, always in some band or choir. The lone exception was for about two years when I had the nastiest, voice-crackingest, Peter Brady-est 6th and 7th grade of anyone I know. I went in as a soprano and came out a Tenor I, but in between I didn't sing at all.
About the time I was going into high school, I was feeling comfortable with my voice again (it takes that long when the first girl you ever ask out had been calling you stuck the nickname "Squeaky" on you), though it was still relatively high-pitched. As a result, I found that I was more comfortable singing chick rock than, like, Metallica, so I gravitated to, among other artists, Michelle Branch.
And people thought it was funny, though I wonder how much of it at the time was me trying to show that I was so masculine that I was comfortable singing parts written for women. So I convinced myself that I was only ironically into The Spirit Room, but I really liked Incubus or Radiohead or whatever bullshit I was supposed to be into when the reverse was actually true.
I had misgivings about starting off this project with a song that, strictly on its own merits, I couldn't really tell you why I liked it. Instead, all I could come up with were 800 words on a song that meant a lot to me, at a specific point in time, because of where I was in my life, what I could play on guitar, and who I had a crush on. It's completely untransferrable.
But that's okay, because we like songs because they're good, or fun, or well-written. We love songs because of how they fit into our lives at a certain point in time. And at a certain point in time, this song meant a lot to me.
