Everything She Wants

Like most other Wham! songs from this period, it was written by George Michael. He discussed in the Fall 1985 issue of ASCAP In Action:

“It’s the only song I’ve written that successfully came from a backing track first. I wrote the Linn drum pattern and found a synthesizer program I liked and wrote the backing track in one evening, took it back to the hotel, and wrote the vocal in a hotel room the next morning. Because it was thrown together that way, I never looked at it as a single ‘til everybody started saying it was great”[3]

Michael elaborated on the song's lyrics and the meaning behind them in Dick Clark's Countdown radio show:

“It’s a lyric about a man who is six or eight months into a marriage which obviously isn’t going well. He’s faced with the ‘happy’ news of an arriving baby. So he’s in that situation where he can’t back out. (The song) talks about the situation (in which) many men find themselves, working really hard to support a family… and see it as a kind of trap. It’s a situation I’ve seen. It’s not the kind of thing I usually write about. Our lyrics are usually a lot closer to the kind of pop lightweight lyric we enjoy, but it’s a departure, and I think it worked.”[3]

"Everything She Wants" was recorded in August 1984 at Marcadet Studios in Paris using a 3M 32-track recorder and was most likely finished off at Sarm West’s Studio 2 in London after most of Make It Big had been finished at Studio Miraval in southeastern France over a period of six weeks.[4][5] The song was based around a mono 2-bar LinnDrum loop, which wasn’t intended as the "keeper drum part" initially but it was eventually used for the finished record.[6] Despite being credited as a Wham! track, it's also a departure in the sense that George Michael recorded the track entirely by himself (with engineer Chris Porter in attendance), as opposed to the typical procedure of using session musicians to realise his ideas (which he did for most of the Make It Big record). According to Porter, “I think this was when George started to realise that if he wanted to, he could do everything himself. He could cut out all these other people and their ideas.” This would pave way for Last Christmas, which would be recorded the same month using the same approach.[7] Plus, all the musicians that had participated in the Marcadet sessions had already flown back to the UK by the time Michael came around to recording it, so perhaps there wasn’t any point in hiring any more session musicians.[5]

Michael confirms:

"For the most part I try and play everything [when writing and recording, but] it wasn’t the case in Wham! Apart from [that] “Last Christmas” and “Everything She Wants” are all me."[8]

He added that both songs were all made on one synthesizer, referring to a Roland Juno-60.[8][7]

"Everything She Wants" was used as a sample on rapper Foxy Brown's "I Can't" from her second album, Chyna Doll, in 1999.

The a cappella group Naturally 7 sampled "Everything She Wants" on their 2011 song "Life Goes On", an arrangement that was personally approved by Michael.[11]

The song features in the 2013 video game Grand Theft Auto V as part of the radio station Non-Stop-Pop FM. The Egyptian Lover's cover appears on iFruit Radio.

In 2020, Alien Ant Farm recorded a rock remake the song. Its music video, shot during the COVID-19 pandemic, features cameos from artists like Insane Clown Posse, Hyro the Hero, Charlie Benante of Anthrax, CJ Pierce of Drowning Pool, and several others.[12]

The song was mentioned in a landmark 1998 sampling copyright decision in the case of Santrayll v. Burrell.[13] US Federal Court Judge Peter K. Leisure concluded that MC Hammer had sampled music by another rap group (The Legend). The Legend admitted to sampling Wham!'s "Everything She Wants" (among other songs) and not disclosing the sampled works when filing for copyright registration.