Originally posted 4/17/2023
“All I Have to Do is Dream” by the Everly Brothers was the number 2 song of 1958 and one of my favorite songs growing up. When I was a child I thought of it as just a pretty song and then, in the years of my teenage crushes I related to it a little more personally. And I have to admit that even now, this is the kind of song that could be put on the soundtrack if there were to be a movie made about my romantic life.
Unrequited and parasocial relationships are definitely a rite of passage for many young people living in the modern age and many songs from the 1950s seemed to have been and probably were written to appeal to the burgeoning “teenager” market. Phil Everly was still a teenager himself at 19 and Don was just 21 when they recorded this song.
But what happens when you don’t have role models for healthy, reciprocal, adult relationships? If you grow up around unhappy and dysfunctional relationships, do you begin to think that all the great love songs and love stories ever written are all ridiculous fantasies? Or do you think that they are what “normal” love should be? Or are you just content to listen, read, watch and dream, dream, dream…?
I have to admit that for too long I vacillated between all three of those reactions. It has taken a lot of therapy and self reflection to realize that real relationships don’t have to look or feel or be a certain way but they do require that the people involved in them be willing to put in the energy to make them work.
I have finally become more interested in understanding the work it takes to make a good relationship just as I have also become more interested in the work it takes to write a good song.
So, it is fitting that “All I Have to Do is Dream” was written by Boudleaux Bryant who, along with his wife and songwriting partner Felice, obviously knew quite a bit about both.
If you look hard enough, good role models are everywhere and it’s never too late to find them.