Everything is free

I had been obsessed with Gillian Welch about a year ago, specifically Time: The Revelator, needing to hear it a couple of times a day. Time wore on, and other stimuli infiltrated my attention. Listening indifferently to it just this week, whilst toiling away at some administrative nonsense, the meaning of one of the songs, Everything Is Free, suddenly became clear. I'd fallen in love with her morose southern drawl and the simplicity of the recordings, not particularly the content of the lyrics.

Everything Is Free seemed to resonate strongly with my own feelings about how music is these days, how the way the world works now. We give everything away for free because we can't beat the pirates. They're too many, we are too few, and our righteous cause of payment for goods and services delivered, is dismissed, let alone even considered. So instead of beating them, we acquiesce, and take money from sponsors instead, directly or indirectly rather than from the listeners themselves.

What I love the most about the song though, is the last verse, which intimates that, if this is the way it must be, then one has no right to demand anything from the musician. Their expression of creativity may well be free for all to hear, but pure. Free from meddling record companies with agendas. The control is placed firmly within the musician's hands.

Whether this is a good thing or not, is somewhat subjective. Some sort of direction, whether it comes from the musician or whether it comes from some svengali type, is always positive. Personally I see both sources of direction as being equally valid, regardless of whether they make money or not. Financial success shouldn't really be linked to purity of expression, or the corruption of it, though it often is. Her two fingers up at all that ironically undermine and yet demand of her, and the stoical nature of her music is something to admired.

Lyrics printed below:

Everything is free now,
That's what they say.
Everything I ever loved,
I'm going to give it away.
Someone hit the big score.
They figured it out,
That we're gonna do it anyway,
Even if doesn't pay.

I can get a tip jar,
Gas up the car,
And try to make a little change
Down at the bar.

Or I can get a straight job,
I've done it before.
I never minded working hard,
It's who I'm working for.

(Chorus)

Every day I wake up,
Come in a song.
But I don't need to run around,
I just stay home.

And sing a little love song,
My love, to myself.
If there's something that you want to hear,
You can sing it yourself.

'Cause everything is free now,
That what I say.
No one's got to listen to
The words in my head.
Someone hit the big score,
And I figured it out,
That we're gonna do it anyway,
Even if doesn't pay.

Listen to the song here:
http://www.myspace.com/gillianwelch