Everything Is Free

Welch wrote it in the Cubby in very late 2000 or very early 2001, when Napster had just appeared and she was afraid that playing music would stop being a living. She said it was about feeling her creative independence threatened, and that the only power she kept was the threat of withholding. It is track nine of Time (The Revelator), recorded live by the two of them at RCA Studio B.

Critics have since heard it as prophecy. Pitchfork called it a premonition of streaming culture, and Rolling Stone a modern standard in the age of streaming. Welch said in 2018 that it sadly speaks to the present, and later that she was sorry it still resonates so strongly, above all with younger musicians.

Covers

Father John Misty recorded a mostly solo acoustic version for Spotify Singles in 2018, and Courtney Barnett sang it on The Tonight Show that year. In 2020 Barnett and Phoebe Bridgers sang it as a bedroom duet for the virtual Newport Folk Festival. Bridgers called it her favorite song ever written about Napster. Welch and Rawlings first played it live at the El Rey Theatre in Los Angeles in September 2001 and still do. The upload in the hypersongs web is the album version.