Looking into All I Need Is You by The Alexanders
Found myself digging into the Eurovision 2014 entry from the Netherlands a while back. The track is All I Need Is You The Alexanders 4 M Malone. Marcus Malone is listed as a co-writer and producer on it, which explains why his name shows up everywhere alongside the song title. The duo is Rolf Sanchez and Ilse DeLange. No, not that Ilse DeLange from Within Tears. This one is just Ilse DeLange, a Dutch singer who'd already been around for years before the Eurovision thing happened. They got 30 points in the final, which was mid-pack. Not great, not terrible. The points table that year was all over the place because of the voting system changes they were testing.
What you need to know about the track
It's a standard pop ballad structure. Verse, pre-chorus, chorus, bridge, big finish. Nothing technically complicated about the chord progression. If you're looking for sheet music or MIDI files, you'll find a few unofficial transcriptions scattered across sites like Musicnotes or SheetMusicPlus, though most of them aren't created by verified arrangers. The key is E major. Tempo sits around 74 BPM. That's about as specific as the published arrangements get on those sites. I ran into an issue when I was trying to map out the vocal line for a cover arrangement. The official sheet music had the bridge transposed an octave differently than how Rolf actually sings it. The studio version layers his part higher than what's written on most printable scores. My workaround was just pulling the audio into Reaper, slowing it to 0.75x, and recording the notes by ear. Took about twenty minutes and was more accurate than anything I could find online.
Where to actually get the song
Streaming is the obvious route. Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music all carry it. The official music video has millions of views on YouTube. If you want to own a copy, Amazon and the usual digital storefronts have the single. The full album it appeared on is Old & New, released through Sony Music Netherlands. I should mention the common confusion people run into. There's another song called "All I Need Is You" by Paul McCartney, and the lyrics are similar enough that search results get muddy. Make sure you're filtering for The Alexanders or Eurovision 2014, otherwise you'll end up miles from what you actually want.
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A note on the production
M Malone's work on this is pretty clean for a Eurovision entry from that cycle. The mix is straightforward, no excessive sidechain pumping or vocal tuning visible. It sounds like actual instruments were tracked alongside the programmed elements rather than replacing them entirely. That's not always the case with entries from around that time, so it's worth noting if you're studying production techniques from that era. The downside is that because it's such a sparse arrangement, there's not a ton of material to work with if you're trying to create an extended remix or DJ edit. Most of the stems you'll find floating around are either unofficial leaks or created by fans pulling individual tracks from the master. Nothing official from Sony came out with separated stems, so if you need isolated vocals or instruments for a specific project, you're working with third-party sources at that point. That's about it for what I know about this one. If you need something specific from the track, the easiest path is just getting the official recording and working from there.
