Exploring Robert Smith’s love for ‘Wish’: “One of the best”
Ask any musician about the most satisfying part of making music – most of them will tell you that it’s the sense of creative flow at its most organic, and while recording Wish, Robert Smith encountered the same sense of gratification, the kind he never really achieved with any previous record.
Creatively, The Cure is one of the most fluctuating bands in music history – specifically, their discography is filled with extreme highs and lows, with a clear hierarchy between their best and worst material. Smith knows this more than anybody, often at the front of the line when dismissing certain material in favour of better or stronger work.
However, as with most rock legends, their achievements far outweigh their mishaps. Even better is that, despite much attention going to their more indisputably masterpieces – Disintegration, Pornography, Wish, and even the more recent Songs of a Lost World – those that sit at the top are rarely overhyped, and do actually live up to all the praise they get, no matter if it’s your first or hundredth time listening.
One of their most commercially successful, Wish, is the ultimate proof of this and one that Smith already knew felt special in a different way during the sessions. As he explained during Tim Burgess’ Twitter listening party for the album’s 30th anniversary, the recording process was filled with a hefty amount of back-and-forth with backing tracks, overdubs, vocals, and other “weird stuff”, but it worked.
Much of it flowed, which meant Smith had a good idea of the order of tracklisting as he went, like immediately knowing that ‘Open’ would be the first on the record. Written about “loss of control” and “overwhelming banality of believing oneself defined by the role ‘singer in a famous band’”, the song captures everything you’d want at the start of a Cure record.
Smith also knew immediately that he wanted ‘High’ to be a single, something that he knew the moment he heard a “hissy” instrumental demo version in Simon Gallup’s kitchen. Sonically, it has a Cure-esque ease to it that’s also in the record’s two other singles, ‘Friday I’m In Love’ and ‘A Letter to Elise’. The former, in particular, was so good that it seemed familiar, like he’d plucked it from somewhere else, even though that wasn’t the case at all.
The latter was inspired by Franz Kafka’s Letters to Felice and its “demented unanswered letters”, spinning this notion into romantic wonderment and placing something inherently dark into Smith’s familiar swirl of chaotic beauty. Interestingly, this sound and style infiltrated the entire album and came from a general uncertainty about how Smith wanted the entire record to feel.
While he knew where he wanted to go with records like Disintegration, Wish had less of a direction from the off, which created an environment of pure, creative liberation – something that Smith always appreciates, having experienced the opposite one too many times. As he put it himself, “I just wanted [the record] to be kaleidoscopic somehow. [It] was just about the most carefree, abandoned, and happy we ever got, I think.”
Perhaps this is why he also called ‘Trust’ one of “the best things we’ve ever done”. According to the musician, it’s “a love song with a dark heart”, which just about sums up many of the band’s best material and how these ambiguities are often where they shine the most. Even more so when they’re at their most creatively free in the studio.
