First Hit #1: May 7, 1988
Terence Trent D’Arby’s voice is strangely incongruous with his tiny, tiny body. He’s got a voice that sounds a bit rough, a bit deep, and a bit like it belongs to a larger, older man. It’s a great voice, but like Rick Astley, he’s got a sound that just doesn’t seem to fit his tiny frame.
It’s the voice that makes Wishing Well, because it’s otherwise quite minimal. A little guitar, a little whistle, and D’Arby crooning over that backdrop to make something that’s quite sensual and appealing. He’s got a voice that can make a song, and Wishing Well is a song that is designed to put that voice front and center. The arrangement is interesting enough, and also quite refreshing overall, but it’s no mistake that it’s using D’Arby’s big voice to fill the frame, and that’s the main color on the canvas. It works, I genuinely love the song, and I also find myself wishing a big voice like Whitney Houston would have been recording with D’Arby and his producers, rather than whoever wrote her song yesterday.
Clearly taking a page from the Michael Jackson book, except he sounds like Tina Turner. No real chorus, just a repeated verse. The song is mostly about his gravelly voice and that whistle riff.