They Want It All

Apr 12, 2025

Welcome to new subscribers and regular readers! Thank you for joining me for today’s song, “They Want It All” by Crosby & Nash. If you’d like to hear the song before you read about it, I’ve included a YouTube video below the article.
Below, you’ll find my interpretation of the lyrics which are written in italics. For Japanese students, vocabulary words in bold are provided in Japanese below. TOEIC (PBT) 450+, Eiken 2, CEFR B1.

(662 words)
Today’s song was written over 20 years ago, in 2004. It talks about greed. At the time, there were many scandals about corporate executives who were involved in financial fraud. Some went to prison (e.g. Enron, WorldCom).

There are many people around the world who have a lot of money, maybe more money than they could use in a lifetime. Some of these people want to get even more money or more things, more houses, or more power.

They want it all, they want it now
They want to get it and they don't care how

Gulfstream G450 B-8251 (Wikimedia Commons, public domain)

Want that Mercedez, that Gulfstream, too A gulf stream is a kind of private jet.
They want to get, get it from you
They want your life savings and your mother’s ring
They'd like to have everything

In the next verse, the word mansion refers to an enormous house, the typical image of a house in Beverly Hills.
They want that mansion and they want it full
Of wine and women and political pull Political “pull” means power.
They always have a president or two
That's how they get away with what they do
To get away with something usually means you’ve done something wrong, but you haven’t been caught or punished. Here, have a president or two means that if you are close to the people at the top of the government, you can influence the decisions that are made.

They bleed the companies they're supposed to run
Bleed means to lose blood because you’ve been cut or injured. Here, it means that some people who are at the top of companies receive much more money than the value of the work they do.
Ain't no different than taking your money with a gun
They make it to Jamaica and their wire comes through
Jamaica is a country that has a low tax rate. Companies that make a lot of money might set up bank accounts there. To wire means to send money from one bank to another. If an executive sends money to an offshore account, it might be hard for the government to find, so the executive won’t have to pay taxes in their home country.
They sacrifice a lawyer and they're laughing at you
The song says that if an executive is found guilty of not paying taxes, he can say that his lawyer told him to do it. The lawyer would then be in big trouble with the law, but the executive would be free (and laughing).

They don't get prosecuted don't even get charged
When someone is arrested for a crime they might have done, they are charged. That means that the police tell them what they have done wrong. Then, lawyers for the government prosecute the person. That means she or he has to go to court to prove they are innocent.

Map of member institutes of the Sun Belt Conference in 2016 after the addition of full member Coastal Carolina. Photo: Skapunkskatedude (Wikimedia Commons)

They're somewhere in the sunbelt living it large
The sunbelt is the southern part of the United States, from California to Florida. There are many resorts, and people like to go there on vacation. Some even choose to live there. The weather is generally warm and nice in these states, not like in the north part of the country. Living it large means you have so much money, you don’t have to work. You can stay by the side of the pool and enjoy every day in the sunshine.

And the government says, “We can't prove they did it at all”
Besides they've got these underlings ready to take the fall
Here, underlings means lawyers or other people working for the top people who will take the blame.

These people that they stole from whose lives they laid to waste
They should have to meet them all face to face
And explain just why their momma didn't teach them not to steal
If you want us to believe in justice, justice better be real

You just don’t give a damn. In other words, you just don’t care.

They Want It All

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