Here’s the latest single from Santa Cruz, California-based singer-songwriter Brock Davis. As soon as All of You opens with quivering slide guitar, followed by tinkling keys, it’s clear that this is a song with melody at its heart. Also, central to the song’s success is the carefully arranged and layered instrumentation. Over swaying rhythm from Marcus Finnie (drums) and Duncan Mullins (bass), Pat McGrath’s acoustic guitar, Russ Pahl’s pedal steel and Michael B. Hicks’ B3 organ add real depth to the mix while Justin Ostrander’s electric and slide guitar returns to the fore several times in solo flourishes. Shot and directed by Karl Weidmann of Southern Cabin Films, the video allows us that privileged position of seeing artists at work in the studio.
Rising from these sonic textures, Davis delivers a soulful, tuneful vocal performance, lifted by backing from Trey Keller. Through his heartfelt, unself-conscious words, Davis explores real, long-term love, the sort of love that comes from knowing a person intimately and accepting every aspect of them. This is unconditional love, without judgement, captured in lines like: “The joy and the sadness // The light and the blackness // I know all of you // I love all of you.” It’s open, direct and relatable.
Davis told AUK exclusively: “A lot of love songs are about that first rush of infatuation—the idealised stage of a relationship when the other person seems perfect, and you’re partly in love with your own idea of them. With All Of You, I wanted to write about a more mature kind of love: the intimacy that comes from knowing someone deeply, seeing the good and the bad, the joy and the sadness, the strength and the vulnerability, and loving the whole person without reservation.
“The song is built around the idea that truly seeing someone is itself an expression of love. Instead of simply saying, ‘I love you,’ I wanted the details to prove it: the little expressions, habits, defences and private moments you only learn after sharing a life with someone.
“It also gave me the opportunity to write a list song, which was something I’d always wanted to do. List songs are a country-music tradition, and this idea lent itself naturally to accumulating all those intimate observations until they added up to something larger: unconditional love.”
Having released a number of albums in the early 2000s, Davis took time away from the music industry to raise a family. He returned with two albums: 2022’s A Song Waiting To Be Sung and 2024’s Everyday Miracle. The new single is taken from the forthcoming album Nothing Lasts Forever, which addresses themes of impermanence and the transience of life. One of the songs, Til The Morning Comes, was inspired by an aunt who discontinued cancer treatment in order to spend her remaining time with loved ones. The authentic feeling behind these songs was reinforced when Davis himself had a health scare during the mixing process, giving a new perspective on the subject matter. After tracking the songs, he was diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer and accelerated the mixing, believing that this might be his final album. Luckily, he is now clear and well; however, he says, “That experience, without doubt, reinforced the message that nothing lasts forever.” He adds: “As I was searching for an album title, I realised that there is an overarching theme of life’s impermanence that ties many of the songs together. Everything changes. If times are hard, it can’t change fast enough. If times are good, we try to hang on as tight as we can, but they pass just the same. We all have our own story about how we come to accept that, and these songs are a few of those stories.” This is the stuff of life and what it means to be human in a transient, uncertain world. Check it out.
