About The Song
“Everything She Wants” is a single by the British pop duo Wham!, released in 1984 under Epic Records. The song was part of a double A-side release with “Last Christmas.” Penned and produced by George Michael, a member of the duo, “Everything She Wants” garnered significant acclaim, marking Wham!’s third consecutive million-selling number-one hits in the United States.
Like most other Wham! songs from this period, it was written by George Michael. He discussed in the fall 1985 issue of ASCAP in Action:
“It’s the only song I’ve written that successfully came from a backing track first. I wrote the Linn drum pattern and found a synthesizer program I liked and wrote the backing track in one evening, took it back to the hotel, and wrote the vocal in a hotel room the next morning. Because it was thrown together that way, I never looked at it as a single ’til everybody started saying it was great.”
Michael elaborated on the song’s lyrics and the meaning behind them in Dick Clark’s Countdown radio show:
“It’s a lyric about a man who is six or eight months into a marriage which obviously isn’t going well. He’s faced with the ‘happy’ news of an arriving baby. So he’s in that situation where he can’t back out. [The song] talks about the situation [in which] many men find themselves, working really hard to support a family… and see it as a kind of trap. It’s a situation I’ve seen. It’s not the kind of thing I usually write about. Our lyrics are usually a lot closer to the kind of pop lightweight lyric we enjoy, but it’s a departure, and I think it worked.”
“Everything She Wants” was recorded in August 1984 at Marcadet Studios in Paris using a 3M 32-track recorder and was most likely finished off at Sarm West’s Studio 2 in London after most of Make It Big had been finished at Studio Miraval in southeastern France over a period of six weeks. The song was based around a mono 2-bar LinnDrum loop, originally intended as a guide but it was eventually kept on the finished record. Despite being credited as a Wham! track, it’s also a departure in the sense that Michael recorded the track entirely by himself (with engineer Chris Porter in attendance), as opposed to the typical process of involving session musicians and Michael conveying his ideas to them. Apparently, the musicians involved in Make It Big had already flown back to the UK when Michael came around to recording the track en route from Studio Miraval, so it was partly out of necessity he worked on it himself. According to Porter, “I think this was when George started to realise that if he wanted to, he could do everything himself. He could cut out all these other people and their ideas.” This would pave way for “Last Christmas”, which followed the same approach.
Video
Lyrics
Ah, ha, ha
Oh-oh, yeah
‘Til you work
Somebody told me
“Boy, everything she wants is everything she sees”
I guess I must have loved you
Because I said you were the perfect girl for me
Baby, and now we’re six months older
And everything you want, and everything you see
Is out of reach, not good enough
I don’t know what the hell you want from me, oh
Uh-huh, uh-huh, oh-oh, oh-oh
Ah-ha, ah-ha, doo-doo-doo
La, la, la, la, la
Uh-huh, uh-huh, oh-oh, oh-oh
Ah-ha, ah-ha, doo-doo-doo
La, la, la, la, la
Somebody tell me, oh
Won’t you tell me?
Why I work so hard for you
Give you money
Work to give you money (oh)
Some people work for a living
Some people work for fun
Girl, I just work for you
They told me marriage was a give-and-take
Well, you’ve shown me you can take, you’ve got some giving to do
And now you tell me that you’re having my baby
I’ll tell you that I’m happy if you want me to
But one step further and my back will break
If my best isn’t good enough, then how can it be good enough for two?
Uh-huh, uh-huh, oh-oh, oh-oh
Ah-ha, ah-ha, doo-doo-doo
I can’t work any harder than I do (la, la, la, la, la)
Uh-huh, uh-huh, oh-oh, oh-oh
Ah-ha, ah-ha, doo-doo-doo
La, la, la, la, la
Somebody tell me, oh
Won’t you tell me?
Why I work so hard for you
Give you money (oh)
Work to give you money (oh)
Aw, why do I do the things I do?
Tell you if I knew
My god, I don’t even think that I love you (la, la, la, la, la)
Won’t you tell me?
Give you money
Work to give you money (oh-ah)
Ah, oh, yeah
Tell me
Tell me
How could you settle for a boy like me
When all I could see was the end of the week?
All the things we sign, and the things we buy
Ain’t gonna keep us together, it’s just a matter of time
My situation never changes walking in and out of that door
Like a stranger for the wages
I give you all, you say you want more
And all I could see was the end of the week
All the things we sign, and the things we buy
Ain’t gonna keep us together
Girl, it’s just a matter of time
Work, work
Work, work
La, la, la, la, la (just a matter of)
Uh-huh, uh-huh, oh-oh, oh-oh
Ah-ha, ah-ha, doo-doo-doo
La, la, la, la, la
Somebody tell me, oh
Won’t you tell me? (Somebody)
Why I work so hard for you
Give you money (oh)
Work to give you money (oh)
Somebody tell me, whoa-oh
Won’t you tell me?
Why I work so hard for you
Give you money (oh)
Work to give you money (oh)
Somebody tell me
Won’t you tell me? (Oh, please tell me…)
Why I do the things that I do
Give you money
Work to give you money (oh)