Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want

Under ninety seconds long and constructed from almost nothing — a gentle acoustic guitar figure, barely-there bass, and a brief orchestral swell that arrives and evaporates before you've registered it — this is a song that makes maximalism feel obscene by comparison. Morrissey's vocal is restrained to the point of appearing fragile, pitched somewhere between prayer and complaint, as though raising his voice even slightly might break the spell entirely. The Smiths borrowed the melody wholesale from a Kirsty MacColl record, and Marr arranged it with a chamber delicacy that suggests the whole thing might collapse if touched. Emotionally it occupies the very precise territory of longing at its most concentrated — not the theatrical despair Morrissey deployed elsewhere, but something quieter and more exposed. The lyric is a simple, shameless wish: let me have this thing I want, just this once. The absence of irony is startling from a songwriter who deployed it so reflexively. This song appeared on the B-side of "William, It Was Really Nothing" and later on the Pretty in Pink soundtrack, which gave it a second life as the definitive sound of teenage romantic hopelessness. It's the kind of song you play when hope is smaller than usual — when you're not asking for much and you already suspect the answer will still be no.