The track Björk called her “most sugary song ever”
If there’s one thing that fans have come to expect from experimental pop icon Björk, it’s to never expect anything straightforward. In the 30 years since she released her first solo album, Debut, in 1993, the Icelandic singer-songwriter hasn’t even come close to anything resembling a traditional pop or love song. Those elements can be found scattered throughout the electronica, orchestral, and otherworldly sounds that she’s produced, but they’re never obvious enough to catch on the first go around.
But that’s not to say it doesn’t occasionally happen. 1997’s Homogenic was Björks most confounding and boundary-pushing work up to that point, but the delicate nature of the album’s closing track ‘All Is Full of Love’ caught many by surprise. Although the icy atmosphere and buzzy electronics that fill out most of the album are present, so is a genuine beauty.
“That song’s from a moment when I’d had a pretty rough winter, and then it was a spring morning, and I walked outside, and the birds were singing: Spring is here! I wrote the song and recorded in half a day,” Björk told David Hemingway. “It just clicked – you know: you’re being too stubborn, don’t be so silly, there is love everywhere. The feeling, the emotion of the song was like completely melting and loving everything and feeling like everything loved you, after a long time of not having that.”
“The song, in essence, is actually about believing in love. Love isn’t just about two persons, it’s everywhere around you. Even if you’re not getting love from Person A, it doesn’t mean there’s no love there,” she claims. “Obviously, it’s taking the piss too – it’s the most sugary song ever. ‘All Is Full Of Love’ was written after the rest of Homogenic, which I’d wanted to be an aggressive, macho album.”
Adding: “In Icelandic mythology, you have this saga where the Gods get aggressive, and the world explodes, and everything dies, and then the sun comes up, and everything starts all over again. It’s the last track on Homogenic after ‘Pluto’, which stands for death. ‘All Is Full Of Love’ is like the birds coming out after a thunderstorm. In a way, in my head, ‘All Is Full Of Love’ is the first song on Vespertine.”
“I guess waking up after having been in Spain for six months in the mountains with few people. It was kind of solitary,” she explained in a 2000 Q+A chat on her website. “And it was April, and I had to walk in the morning around the mountains. And spring just kicked in. It was definitely nature-inspired. On a more personal level. It’s about when you have been too stubborn about giving love to one particular direction… you expect it back, like it’s a bank or something. And kind of realising that it’s up to you what you give, but it’s not up to you what you are given and where from.”
“Sometimes the words will come out in one go,” Björk told Q magazine about the song in 2007. “I went out for a walk in 1997, and ‘All Is Full Of Love’ came out at once.”
