‘Everything is Free’: Gillian Welch’s increasingly prescient anthem
It’ll take an awful lot of change for folk music to ever lose its poignance and importance in the world. Whether looking at it from a modern angle or at its earliest forms, ‘folk music’ has remained rooted in traditions that have been carried through generations and has always projected themes and sentiments that explore the human condition and our relationship with the world. It would be impossible to ever truly lose the folk song, as it essentially lives within our nature.
Often, folk music has explored either the artist’s or society’s struggles with topics that were prescient at the time of writing, which remains true despite how much culture has advanced in recent years. One notable example of this is Gillian Welch’s ‘Everything Is Free’, a song that laments a particular hardship felt by artists that is still just as relevant today.
Released in 2001 on her album Time (The Revelator), the track explores the rising trend of illegal downloading at the time and how it removed the idea that an artist should be paid for their work, rendering their toil futile.
At the end of the first verse, Welch sings, “Someone hit the big score, they figured it out, that we’re gonna do it anyway, even if it doesn’t pay”. It features a number of other hard-hitting lines about the pains of putting in effort when you know that someone is there willing to exploit you in some way, and yet, in the face of being stripped of your worth, you’ll continue to grind away at your craft.
While the days of people flocking to LimeWire to cop the latest album leaks are long gone, the discussion around fair pay in the music industry is still a hot topic today, with many artists campaigning for streaming services to come up with a viable model for redistributing subscription fees to the artists that use their platforms. With this in mind, Welch’s song from over 20 years ago has found a new lease of life, as the industry and society’s inability to front a real change is felt by even some of the modern era’s most celebrated artists.
Artists such as Courtney Barnett, Father John Misty, and Phoebe Bridgers have all paid tribute to the song in some way, either recording covers of the track or incorporating it into their live performances to protest how artists still have little control over their earnings and how those at the top of the industry ladder who pay them pittance always seem to get the final say in the matter.
Bridgers, in particular, highlighted how relevant the song is despite having been written under different circumstances, saying that “it’s incredible to me that Gillian wrote a song essentially about the internet and managed not to compromise her style at all.” She referred to how, despite the song’s grapplings with technological flaws, it remains true to her folk roots.
Speaking to Rolling Stone about the song’s origins, Welch confirmed that the song was written in response to reading an article about Napster and its rapid destruction of the music industry’s ability to generate revenue through record sales. “It’s about feeling like my personal creative independence was threatened,” says Welch. “What I realised over the course of writing the song was that the power I retained was the threat of withholding.”
She would then go on to say how “there were a number of songs I can remember crying while working on them, and that was the case with this one.” When asked about its resurgence in popularity many years later, her response was just as mournful. “People have asked me if I was sad that it was still relevant,” she concluded. “I was sorry that it is still resoundingly resonating with people, even more so with younger musicians.”
