Songfacts®:

• Big Wreck split up after their 2001 album The Pleasure and the Greed, with lead singer Ian Thornley forming a band called Thornley. They re-formed for the 2012 Albatross album, which was successful in their native Canada, earning a Juno nomination for Rock Album of the Year. Regarding this song, Thornley said in his Songfacts interview: "A lot of my own personal stuff tends to find its way into the music. And that's how I stay really, really umbilically connected to it. I have a lot of tour writing that's completely third person, like a Bruce Springsteen or like a Bob Dylan - Gordon Downie [lead singer of The Tragically Hip] even is great at that. I have a hard time writing like that. I think that's real grown up writing, and I'd like to be able to do it some day. I'm not quite there yet. So I tend to take slices of my own life and sort of embellish them. 'All Is Fair' is a direct result of that, for sure."
• The dueling guitars at the end of this song provide a memorable close. Ian Thornley told us: "To me the whole outro of 'Always Fair,' the argument between the guitars, we were actually trying to make it sound like an argument that was coming to a heated pitch and then comes to and end. But all the songs, almost all of them, are relationship songs. Maybe not necessarily with a loved one or with a wife or girlfriend or whatever, even with a colleague. That might be one of the better ones as far as a romantic relationship, trying to describe it."