If all else fail, would you be there to love me?
When all else fail, would you be brave to see right through me?
These are beautiful, eminently singable lines of verse. I’m not surprised that they are your favorite, and I have no doubt that you had interpreted them right the first time around. Of course, the prism of one’s personal experience with love can momentarily blur or reshape that interpretation, but thankfully, the essence of love remains ever the same.
As to its usage of the conjunctions “if” and “when,” there’s actually no great semantic difference between the two. They are practically synonymous in the sense of “in the event that.” Grammatically, though, the first line—“If all else fail, would you be there to love me?”—is a sentence in the subjunctive mood, using the conjunction “if” to denote a contingent outcome or the speaker’s sense of uncertainty. The second line, “When all else fail, would you be brave to see right through me?”, is a question in the indicative form using the “when” form of conditionality, a form that states the outcome assuming that the condition is already happening or subsisting. Semantically, though, both “if” and “when” produce the same nuance of meaning here.
In fact, Miss Mae, I checked out the origin of those lines of verse and I found out that they are the last two lines of the lyrics of the song “Same Ground” by Filipino songwriter and singer Kitchie Nadal. And what do you know? The original lyrics actually used the conjunction “if” for both lines!
If all else fail, would you be there to love me
If all else fail, would you be brave to see right through me?
Over the past five or six years, though, a version using “when” for the last line began to appear—the version that became so meaningful to you. But no matter. Whether using “if” or “when,” those two lines of the song are both grammatically airtight and, of course, equally singable and memorable.