- Crushing Krisis

“All That’s True” was a passive act of collaboration.

I have this friend Gina who i’ve been friends with ever since i finally escaped my Born Again grade school in 1994. She was the reason i started to do theatre, and the reason i started to play guitar – because she’s always made both things look so incredibly effortless. One thing i started on my own was songwriting, because Gina was never one with much of a bent towards lyrical writing. When i wrote my first song i was too awful at guitar playing to write the music so she wrote it for me and then taught it to me. The next year she wrote one of her first sets of lyrics, and they were amazing, but she never really did anything with them. So, in the summer of 1999 i was up late one night doing nothing and i had just gotten into the tuning FADGCF, which is now one of my favourites. I was playing around with the tuning, which lets you play lots of nice open C and F chords, and i happened to be trolling through my Netscape email for snippets of lyrics that had been left by the wayside, and one thing lead to another and “All That’s True” got written. Gina still doesn’t know how to play it, but if she comes over later i’ll teach her. Here are the lyrics:

If a rose bloomed in winter would it be a strange sight/ what if it had blue petals/ and only bloomed at night/ do you think it still would be called a rose/ if it didn’t smell as sweet/ I think instead, they’d just rename it/ and sell it on the street, because//

I wonder what would happen if I went back/ to when all the cave men were here/ I wonder what would happen if I took two rocks/ and discovered fire and decided to call it air/ do you think that I’d be famous/ would they draw me on a cave wall/ do you think they’d give me their barter/ so I could profit from it all//

If a rose bloomed in winter/ would they sell it on TV/ and for 49.95/ could i get a second one for free/ do you think by any other name/ it would smell as sweet/ or would it just be another flower/ sold off the corner of the street//

Everything’s for sale today, just like it was before/ and tomorrow there’ll be something new that’ll make it all worth more/ in the end, it’s all worth nothing/ if it means nothing to you/ but that’s okay if the money’s made/ ’cause that is all that’s true/ // / Everything’s for sale today, just like it was before/ and tomorrow there’ll be something better that will cost you so much more/ it’s all worth nothing in the end/ worth nothing to you/ but they can make their money/ if we can keep our right to choose