All My Dreams

Album: Natural Rebel (2018)
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Songfacts®:

  • The first track on Richard Ashcroft's fifth solo album, "All My Dreams" reflects his relationship with his wife, Kate, whom he married in 1995. "All my dreams wrapped up with you," he sings.

    "Not all relationships are a perfect ying-yang situation - sometimes people put a lot on someone else," he explained in a Songfacts interview. "We could, together, reach that dream, but ultimately without that person being willing to follow that path, that reality won't happen. It takes two to tango, as the cliché says, but that's the truth. In any relationship, in a sense, the other person does hold a lot of your dreams within them because if you haven't got a positive love ambition for that relationship, then what the hell are you dreaming for? What are you dreaming about? Ultimately, hopefully, it's spending some healthy time together and being positive.

    It's just simple stuff like that, that is actually life. As we see all the trappings and the fear and the anxieties and desires that are constantly beamed at us, of course we're going to lose a little sense, certainly in an urban environment, of an analog world. An analog world that is about tactile things, that is about skin touching, holding, is about tears. It's about that kind of thing."
  • A theme of this song is vulnerability. For Ashcroft, living in a city as a public figure brings out his insecurities, which are amplified by the barrage of ceaseless negative news, as reflected in the opening lines:

    The lights are always on red
    The radio man said someone died and


    It's family and nature that can often get him through.
  • Ashcroft's wife, who is also a musician (she played keyboards in the band Spiritualized), bought him an old LinnDrum, which Ashcroft used on the Natural Rebel album. Introduced in 1982, the LinnDrum was used on many '80s hits, including "Take On Me" and "The Boys of Summer." Ashcroft's drummer, Emre Ramazanoglu, used it as a starting point for the tracks, giving songs like this one a throwback feel.

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