If She Knew What She Wants
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| "If She Knew What She Wants" | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
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| Promotional single by Jules Shear | ||||
| from the album The Eternal Return | ||||
| B-side | "Chain Within Chain" | |||
| Released | June 1985 | |||
| Genre | ||||
| Length | 3:44 | |||
| Label | Capitol | |||
| Songwriter | Jules Shear | |||
| Producers |
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| Jules Shear singles chronology | ||||
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| Audio | ||||
| "If She Knew What She Wants" on YouTube | ||||
"If She Knew What She Wants" is a song written by American singer-songwriter Jules Shear and introduced on his 1985 album The Eternal Return. The Bangles recorded the song for their 1986 album Different Light. That version, a call-and-response rendition with Susanna Hoffs as the main voice,[1] was issued as a single and became a Top 40 hit. A mid-tempo ballad, it is sung from the viewpoint of someone, per songwriter Shear, "who wants to satisfy someone else but doesn't quite know how to do it because the other person is capricious."[2] The song, especially The Bangles' version, is typically described with such adjectives as "bittersweet", "plaintive" and "wistful".[3][4][5][6][7][8]
"If She Knew What She Wants" was released on February 8, 1985 on Jules Shear's second solo album, The Eternal Return, to critical acclaim.[9][10][11][12] John Piekarski of The Atlanta Constitution lauded the song's "melody [as] dreamy and vivacious yet mellow enough [for] adult contemporary radio [airplay]."[13] An album review by High Fidelity assessed Shear's love songs as "astute [being] equal parts compassion, affectionate wit, and armchair psychoanalysis", exemplified by the lyric "If she knew what she wants I'd be giving it to her" which "condenses a self-help manual for the mates of neurotics into a single piercing line."[14] Shear himself would say that he typically imparted his songs with "some little twist that makes [them] rise above" standard pop music fare, and "It doesn't really have to be too complicated to be a little bit different."[2]
Although passed over as lead single on The Eternal Return in favor of the Cyndi Lauper co-written "Steady" (whose Hot 100 peak was no. 57), "If She Knew What She Wants" was tagged as the potential followup with EMI, who sent promo copies to radio stations in June 1985. When no significant airplay resulted, EMI canceled both the single's commercial release and a tour by Shear to support his album.[15][16] Shear's original version was co-produced by Shear and Bill Drescher, not to be confused with the baseball player of the same name.
