The Washington, D.C.-based band Vertical Horizon toiled in obscurity throughout the 1990s, but their patience paid off once the new millennium arrived. The group made its first entry onto the Billboard Hot 100 three weeks into the year 2000. The title track from their album Everything You Want turned out to be their first and only No. 1 hit.
To understand the meaning of “Everything You Want,” patience is also a virtue. Frontman Matt Scannell wrote the song, and he made the message behind the lyrics abundantly clear, as long as they are taken literally. He has said some listeners understood his lyrics to be a religious allegory, but their meaning is actually straightforward. You just have to pay attention to the song all the way through to the end to get the gist. “Everything You Want” is just four minutes long, but if you’re looking for the TL;DR (or actually, too long; didn’t listen), you’ve come to the right place.
Waiting for the Wrong Savior
Right from the opening lines of “Everything You Want,” Scannell is narrating a story about someone who doesn’t make good decisions and needs the guidance of others to stay out of trouble.
Somewhere there’s speaking
It’s already coming in
Oh, and it’s rising in the back of your mind
You could never get it
Unless you were fed it
Now you’re here, and you don’t know why
The subject in question has some understanding of this, but she just can’t seem to find the right person to guide her through the events that have left her with “skinned knees” and “skid marks.” (Scannell has said the song’s subject is a “she”—more on this later.) Scannell concludes the first verse by telling us that she will Listen and wait for the / Echoes of angels who won’t return.
In the chorus, Scannell alerts us to the fact that there is someone who can help her, but she is oblivious to this. Scannell sings, He’s everything you want / He’s everything you need / He’s everything inside of you / That you wish you could be. However, even though He says all the right things / At exactly the right time, this potential savior is not even on this woman’s radar.
“Written Out of Frustration”
In the final chorus, Scannell reveals the savior is him, as he switches up the pronouns from third to first person. In an interview with Songfacts, Scannell revealed he was not just imagining this situation for the purpose of writing the song. “Everything You Want” was based on his experience with a woman he had fallen in love with, whom he described as a “beautifully complex and crazy person.” He said, “I just thought of a sort of tormented, glass-is-half-empty person who was in pain about a bunch of things that had happened to her in her life, and always wound up looking to the wrong places to find solace and to find help.”
Scannell wasn’t just narrating this story from a detached perspective. He brought the disappointment from his actual relationship into the song. He told Songfacts, “it was written out of frustration, it was written out of sadness, and from my perspective, a sense of wishing that she would turn to me, and to realize that I wanted to help her in ways that maybe she couldn’t see as it being what she really needed. And she never did.”
A Slow Climb to the Top
“Everything You Want” was one of the most popular songs to usher in the new millennium, but it initially looked like it would be a minor hit at best. It wasn’t even the lead single from Everything You Want—that honor went to “We Are,” which went to No. 21 on Billboard’s Alternative Airplay chart in the summer of 1999. “Everything You Want” was released as the second single in October 1999, but it took three months to debut on the Hot 100. The song only needed five weeks to crack the Top 40, but it spent the next five months traveling from No. 40 to No. 1.
“Everything You Want” was the 11th song to reach No. 1 on the Hot 100 in the 2000s, and it ranked No. 5 on the year-end Hot 100 for 2000. The song was a Top-5 hit on Billboard’s Pop Airplay and Alternative Airplay charts as well. The album Everything You Want spent 71 weeks on the Billboard 200, topping out at No. 40, and it was certified Double Platinum in August 2001.
The Aftermath of “Everything You Want”
Vertical Horizon would never come close to topping the Hot 100 again. In fact, aside from the follow-up singles from Everything You Want—“You’re a God” and “Best I Ever Had (Grey Sky Morning)”—the band would not place another song on that chart. Still, each of their next three albums—Go, Burning the Days, and Echoes from the Underground—charted on the Billboard 200, and Go was notable for placing three singles on Billboard’s Adult Pop Airplay chart. Burning the Days featured Richard Marx and the late Rush drummer Neil Peart on selected tracks, and Peart co-wrote the album-closer “Even Now” with Scannell.
Peart was one of Scannell’s musical heroes growing up. In an interview with former Marillion and GTR drummer Jonathan Mover for Drumhead magazine, Scannell said their collaboration grew out of the two musicians meeting when a friend had asked Scannell and his girlfriend to take photos of Peart’s car for his website.
Not many musicians get to work with their musical heroes or release a series of commercially successful albums, but Scannell can check both of these boxes. The success of “Everything You Want,” in particular, shows that good things can come to those who wait, even if the relationship that inspired the song taught Scannell a different lesson.
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Photo by Jeff Moore/ZUMA Press Wire/Shutterstock
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