#75, “Want,” The Cure (1996)

150 Favorite Songs: #75, “Want,” The Cure (1996)

Every Cure fan has a favorite era of the band. The early, punky, lo-fi days, or the heavy, high-goth Pornography era, or the sweeping, majestic Disintegration days of the late ‘80s. Mine, perhaps unsurprisingly, is the era during which I was a teenager, which is to say the ‘90s version where they were most of those things at once—a pop band with goth leanings and a heavy interest in the grand and dramatic.

Wild Mood Swings, the album that “Want” leads off, is not The Cure’s best-loved album. Its title is indicative of why, maybe—it veers from cloyingly poppy to devastatingly sad to bombastic in its drama, and back, a few different times. Goths couldn’t feel good singing along to “Mint Car” (opening line: “the sun is out / I’m so happy I could scream”) and fans who were drawn to that sort of joyful major-key burst were unlikely to be in the mood for “Numb” (opening line: “yeah, this is how it ends / after all these years / tired of it all / hopelessly, helplessly, broken apart”). I’ve never really had a problem feeling lots of different, often contradictory, things at once, though, and also this was the first Cure album to be released when I was a teenager and interested in music, so it was the one that came with a rush of discovery. I was caught up in real-time for this one. I bought it at the record store in Highland, Indiana the day it came out, and rode my bike straight home to play it.

Even without that context, though, “Want” is a heck of an opening statement. It opens with a roar of feedback and then two minor-key notes that drone for almost thirty seconds before the bass comes in, then the drums (slowly, really teasing it out) building a song out of nothing right in front of you. It takes its time in doing so, too; the second guitar doesn’t even come in until after the two-minute mark, and then Robert Smith doesn’t start singing we’re almost halfway into the five-minute track.

Once he does come in, ol’ Bob turns in one of his more underrated vocal performances. The song is a confession, and a plea, a yearning from a man who had been a rock star since he was a teenager about the emptiness that he feels—but related in a way that manages to avoid feeling whiny, I think because he doesn’t feel sorry for himself in the way he expresses it. “Want” is more a howl of frustration than a complaint. He sings a thesis statement when he does finally bring his voice to the track: “I’m always wanting more / anything I haven’t got / everything, I want it all.” The song has a pre-chorus that’s mostly just a shopping list, which is something The Cure did a surprising amount of back in those days: “More drink, more dreams, more bed, more drugs, more lust, more lies, more head, more love, more fear, more fun, more pain, more flesh, more stars, more smiles, more fame, more sex,” before bringing it to its conclusion, which is a true thing that is relatable even to someone who has never been a rock star, whose wants may border more on “need”—“However hard I want, I know deep down inside,” he sings, “I’ll never really get more hope / or any more time.”

That’s a useful insight, I think, that those things are finite, and that all of the things that one might use as a proxy—drugs, sex, etc—are a poor substitute for hope and time. I was a young teenager when Wild Mood Swings was released, and I felt a truth to them even though I didn’t have any experience with most of the things Robert Smith sang about filling his particular emotional void with (I did have a bed). Something about “Want” lodged in my head the first time I heard it, when I was fifteen years old, and stayed there for the next several decades—that time, especially, was a precious commodity and that if even someone as successful and important to me personally as Robert Smith could lament having burned through so much of it and still feel empty, I had a responsibility to use it.

I’ve seen The Cure play four times in the past few years, and most of those shows, they played “Want,” which isn’t true of anything else off of Wild Mood Swings. According to Setlist.fm, they’ve played it 359 times, their 29th most-played song—which is especially impressive given that a lost of the 28 songs ahead of it had been around for decades by the time this one was recorded. In hindsight, it seems like the band has acknowledged it as a high point from Wild Mood Swings, which is fair. I also suspect that, in all the years since he wrote it, “I’ll never really get more hope or any more time” probably only rings more true.