Song #766: "To Be With You" by Mr. Big

Date: Feb 29, 1992
Weeks: 3

You may also remember Mr. Big as the band behind the song "Wild World." I guess this one came first, although really they're so similar that you can be forgiven for getting them confused. This apparently wasn't the type of music Mr. Big usually made. Their usual music was a bit harder, kind of similar to what Aerosmith was doing at the time. But they wrote a softer song on a lark and stuck it on their album, and somehow that's the song that got popular, and here it is at No. 1.

For whatever reason, hard rock bands loved doing acoustic songs in the late 80s and early 90s, and people rewarded them for it, I guess because they thought the songs had deeper meanings just because they were presented as soft songs. The problem is that when all the production falls away and leaves only a basic string of guitar chords, with tambourines and handclaps for percussion, the song winds up living and dying on its vocals.

And the vocals are not great. Look, you don't need to be a great singer to sing great music, but singers need to know their strengths and weaknesses and match themselves to the right kind of music. Hard rock is the right kind of music for these singers; acoustic guitar songs are not. The lead singer is especially problematic. I think he's going for "emotionally vulnerable and intense" but he winds up being "whiny and arrhythmic" instead. The other members of the band harmonizing on the chorus do a better job, but they aren't an especially talented group of singers because I don't think that's what they joined the band to do.

As for the lyrics, the general idea is that this guy has been waiting for a woman to stop dating other guys and get around to noticing him. I feel like I just reviewed the exact same song yesterday. Is it universal, or is it cliche? This one at least has some silly lines in it, though. "Your game of love was all rained out." That's a bit of a thin metaphor right there. "Waited on a line of greens and blues." What does that even mean? Somebody out there claims it's referring to the singer's envy (green) and sadness (blue), but that seems like a thin metaphor considering how that sentence is constructed. Also, the song keeps referring to the woman as "little girl," which is obnoxious. I mean, I get why relatively immature guys refer to women as "girls," but "little girl" just seems intentionally diminishing.

My verdict: Don't like it. I was going to criticize the singer for just waiting around and never saying anything to this woman, but I suppose the song itself is a declaration of his affection. Anyway, I sort of liked this song back when it was new, but time has not been kind to it.