“Desperately Wanting” by Better Than Ezra

"Desperately Wanting" was the second single from Friction, Baby, Better Than Ezra's third album, and it went out late in 1996. Kevin Griffin wrote it alone, and it's a memory song dressed as a mid-tempo rocker, guitars chiming and Griffin's voice straining toward something already gone.

He's said it goes back to summer nights of his Southern boyhood, camping out with friends and tearing through the neighborhood after dark, stirring up trouble and racing across lawns slick with dew. Then the story splits: two friends head down different roads, one piles up bad choices and ends up struggling with his mind, and the pair simply drift out of each other's lives. All that wild nostalgia and quiet regret made for a chart hit in the US, Canada and Australia.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.