Constant Craving

Lang has said that the music came quickly on a small Casio keyboard after she told Mink she wanted flowing open chords like those of Joni Mitchell's Black Crow, but the lyrics took months. Then she sat at a window with a typewriter and the phrase constant craving arrived. She links it to samsara, the Buddhist cycle of birth and death. Mink said it began as Easter Passover, named for a day that was both holidays, and that they spent days settling the chords of the chorus.

The recording was difficult. Mink and Greg Penny both said lang thought the song too commercial, and Mink said she wanted to drop it early. The first version was tracked in a key too low for her voice, and Mink stayed up late redoing the guitars in a new key, which kept it alive. A version with pedal steel was judged too country, because lang wanted something European, like a Marlene Dietrich track, Penny said. He recalled that she left the Los Angeles sessions without finishing a third verse, so Mink wrote a guitar part on a National Avalon guitar instead. In a 1995 interview lang said she drinks Coca-Cola in the studio to get through hard vocals, although she used Pepsi for this one.

It was released in the UK on 27 April 1992. Mink said little happened until American DJs started playing it and the Warner Bros. switchboard lit up. It reached number 8 in Canada and number 38 on the Billboard Hot 100, her only US top-40 hit, and number 2 on the Adult Contemporary chart. A reissue in 1993 took it into the UK top 20. It won the 1993 Grammy for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance. The black-and-white video, directed by Mark Romanek, is a fanciful recreation of the premiere of Beckett's Waiting for Godot in Paris in 1953, with lang singing backstage, and it won Best Female Video at the 1993 MTV Video Music Awards.

In 1997 the Rolling Stones released Anybody Seen My Baby? with a refrain similar to the chorus of this song, and Jagger and Richards gave writing credits to lang and Mink. Pitchfork's Laura Snapes called it a brilliant song that nonetheless feels tacked on to the album. Lang has said she tired of singing it in the Nineties, and that it is now more like a treat.