“All For One” by JOBIE: A Tender, Lovely Tribute

This beautiful song is a tribute to a lost love, although I wouldn’t really call it a love song. If anything, “All For One” is about idealized love, which should be an oxymoron if you think about it. Essentially, the speaker of this song seemed to fall in love with the idea of a person rather than the person themselves.

The song itself is quite calming to listen to, but the low acoustic sound forces you to take in the intense lyrics. Because of this, I could really feel the regret and pain through simply listening to JOBIE’s voice. JOBIE emulates the feeling of mourning someone you wanted to love as well as the coexisting feeling that you don’t really have the right to be upset because you know you didn’t actually fall in love with the person.

“My baby doll, my one for all

My golden sun, my all for one, my all for one”

This song’s imagery really seemed to capture this idea. It’s more external imagery than anything else, which really drove home the point of idealism. Your understanding is simply surface level. This person was like the actual sun that the earth revolves around, but was it truly just nice to look at from time to time? And as physically beautiful and bright as this interest is, that’s not enough to know whether a relationship will last.

“I made you out of silk and now you’re standing here”

This love interest was handmade. I think that’s such a fine detail worth mentioning. It acknowledges the fact that our perceptions are really just our own mind at work. It’s a force of habit to spin someone out of silk even if they’ve shown the signs of just being, I don’t know, a cotton T-shirt.

But here’s the thing about this idealized love; it’s rare that these external features that we fall in love with seem to change, at least in our minds. At the very least, all of us can relate to this song on some level. Nowadays, it’s easier than ever to get attached to the image or idea of a person because of social media’s presence in our everyday lives. People have control over their image, meaning our perceptions of others aren’t always easy to change.

That’s why “All For One” is such a heartfelt song; no matter how badly we want to change these things, it’s just hard. We feel the same way JOBIE does. We’ve all done the same thing before. And once you recognize these feelings, it’s easier for you to let go.