FEATURE:
Groovelines
Sophie B. Hawkins – Damn I Wish I Was Your Lover
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AMONG some of the more overlooked…
and inspiring women in music during the 1990s, Sophie B. Hawkins deserves more retrospective acclaim. On 31st March, her epic and iconic song, Damn I Wish I Was Your Lover, turns thirty. It was taken from her amazing debut album, Tongues and Tails. Considered one of the best singles of the 1990s, it has won acclaim through the decades. I will source an article that takes us into the song and the story behind it. A hit around the world, I think that Hawkins’ Damn I Wish I Was Your Lover is a song that sounds timeless and will be heard and enjoyed for decades more. It is a terrific track that opens with such a captivating and image-rich line: “That old dog has chained you up all right”. Although Hawkins never repeated the success and quality of her debut album, her most-recent album, 2012’s The Crossing, is an interesting release. Thirty years ago, the world received this amazing song that is instantly appealing, memorable and quotable. I heard it first when I was at middle school, and it is a track that I kept hearing on radio regular for a few years after 1992. Even now, I can listen to Damn I Wish I Was Your Lover and find new layers and things to admire. Marking herself out as a distinct and engaging songwriter with a unique lyrical voice, I am sure there are songwriters around today that have taken something from Sophie B. Hawkins.
I want to heavily quote from an article American Songwriter published last year. They provided some great background to a track that is considered a classic today:
“It’s as intense an expression of desire as ever has graced the pop charts, so intense, in fact, that it needed a mild expletive just to drive the point home. But, as it turns out, “Damn I Wish I Was Your Lover” was less about Sophie B. Hawkins striving for some sort of physical connection than it was about her finding her own self as a singer-songwriter.
As Hawkins told American Songwriter in an extensive interview, the sequence of events leading up to her writing the 1992 Top 5 single helped, in many ways, to berth the song. At the time, Hawkins was thinking of a life in music as a percussionist, but her brief stint as a marimba and vibraphone player in Bryan Ferry’s band convinced her of a different career path.
“I was breaking into what could have been the dream gig for a drummer/percussionist, and then I got fired,” Hawkins says. “I had worked so many hours for so many days for so long, that I could’ve been upset about it. But I thought it was a ticket to my freedom. I thought, ‘You don’t really want to be a sideman and go on tour with these people. As wonderful as they are, that’s not who you are.’”
Thus, Hawkins willed herself into becoming a songwriter, with “Damn I Wish I Was Your Lover” one of the first fruits of this transformation. “I started writing the lyrics on my wall,” she remembers. “I didn’t know they were lyrics. They were just things on the wall. And I played those piano chords, (sings) ‘Baa-baah,’ with the G as the base. Which was a mistake, of course, because the best things happen from mistakes. I was so tired from playing over and over again that my hand didn’t move from the G chord, and it was just so beautiful, the A and D over a G, and I had never heard it before.”
“And I thought that was really something big. It was this feeling inside of me: Something big is about to happen to you, Sophie. And it was the first big thing that had ever happened in my life, because I had never had that feeling before. Because I was a total loser, D student, nothing ever really happened the way I wanted it to happen. I thought, ‘Something is coming out of you that you know is in there. And if you can just get it out, if you can just be here, this will happen.’”
As Hawkins continued writing, she came up with the idea of changing the emphasis in the chorus, a decision that would pay off huge dividends. “I remember playing with the chorus,” she says. “And it wasn’t DAMN! It was more like ‘Damn, I wish I was your lover’ (sings it softly). It was very soft. When you listen to it, there is a low voice that is actually the melody. And I loved it but I thought that no one is going to see this as a chorus.”
Hence, came the idea to shout out the word “Damn”, the passion of it mirroring both her longing for a new way of life and her exultation of realizing that she knew she needed one. “I wasn’t in any relationship that was as sophisticated as the song,” Hawkins says of the misconception that she had someone specific in mind as the object of her affection. “But I had been triggered by a lot of emotional events to bring the song out of me. There are times when you write a song and you think that it’s OK and it’s fun to play, people like it, whatever. But then there are the times when a song comes out where you feel like it’s almost ugly. It’s almost excruciatingly uncomfortable to listen to but yet you’re compelled. Those are the good songs.”
“It was so strong because I was at a point of so much loss, but with the potential to break out of my chains. That’s why I think loss is so important and failure is so important. Not because failure always leads to success or because you learn from your mistakes. Because actually you’re only failing at being who you really aren’t. Then you get to say, ‘Who could I be?’ And that’s ‘Damn I Wish Was Your Lover.’ The feeling and the sensuality and the depth of the story is my life story.”
Hawkins instinctively realized that the song, which would appear as the leadoff single to her 1992 debut Tongues And Tails, was something special. But she thought it might be too personal or too strange for public consumption. “I thought ‘Damn’ was cumbersome,” she remembers. “It was so real for me and so me. But I also thought it was so layered. I mean, ‘That old dog has chained you up all right.’ I thought, ‘Who’s going to get that?’ But it turns out a lot of people got it on a lot of different levels.
“Knowing is the curse of all art. Lots of people have said that. The magic of any great thing is the originality and the unwieldy sense that it almost doesn’t work. It just barely works. And that’s the thing about ‘Damn.’ It just works. It could have gone off the rails.”
Still, Hawkins didn’t have high expectations. “Before the record even came out, I was sure Sony was going to drop me when they realized how bad of a songwriter I was. And then when the record came out, I was almost apologetically on tour because I didn’t really believe that people were going to like it. Because I knew that I liked it and that already meant that it was weird. My expectations were that I would be dropped and that I would go back to being obscure.”
Those fears were allayed as “Damn I Wish I Was Your Lover” gained attention from music fans who knew something fresh and different when they heard it. As Hawkins hoped, people were drawn to the rawness and vulnerability of both the song and her performance. And, as years have gone by, the song has evolved into a fixture within pop culture. After all, that chorus sums up unrequited feelings better than any exposition could ever hope to do.
Hawkins at least had an inkling this end result was possible, and it’s something that can’t be taken away from her. “It may have been more successful if I had let Sony tamper with it,” she muses. “They’ve proven time and time again that they can make something an even more massive hit. But I think the longevity is because of the uniqueness of it.”
“They can say in so many ways, I make bad decisions about business or whatever, because I have these really strong beliefs and I stick to them. But I always knew that this song, if it made it, was the big classic. Me as an artist, I thought I’d be thrown away in two seconds. But I thought the song had legs”.
I was minded to look back at Sophie B. Hawkins’, Damn I Wish I Was Your Lover, as I have been collating playlists of songs celebrating big anniversaries this year. At the end of March, her best-known track turns thirty. It is such a great track that, whilst it has a dark and troubled story and message, is uplifting and strengthening at the same time. No doubt one of the defining songs of the 1990s, this is one we will be sharing and spinning for generations. As I have said, it is so instantly appealing. You can come to it for the first time and, when you hear it again, that chorus will be lodged in your head! I am very pleased I have got to cover…
A powerhouse classic.