All I Want Is You

Bono wrote this song for his wife Ali when they were considering having children and he was wondering if he could cut it as a father despite his flaws. She reassured him, telling him she loved all of him, even the troubled parts. The lyric is from her perspective, telling Bono that he can offer her riches (which he had thanks to U2's previous album, The Joshua Tree), but all she really wants is him. "She is the singer of the song," Bono explained in his book Surrender. "It became one of our most enduring songs and the opposite of pretty much everyone's reading of it." Bono and Ali ended up having four children, the first, Jordan, born in 1989, the year after this song was released.

"All I Want Is You" is the last song on the Rattle And Hum album and it plays under the closing credits of the companion documentary, which shows U2 performing on their Joshua Tree tour. It was the fourth and final single released from the album, following "Desire," "Angel Of Harlem" and "When Love Comes To Town."

Van Dyke Parks arranged the strings. He was best known for working with Brian Wilson on the Beach Boys Smile project, writing intricate lyrics for Wilson's melodies, but many other artists have called upon his services as a session musician and arranger, including T Bone Burnett, Rufus Wainwright and Joanna Newsom. When Songfacts spoke with Parks in 2011, he talked about "framing" a song to give it "greater power of enunciation so that it will be noticed." "All I Want Is You" is a great example of his work, as the strings bring out an emotive quality in the song without detracting from its other elements.