Songfacts®:

• "Wishful Sinful" is either about the profound and mysterious depths of the subconscious mind, or it's about a girl. It depends on which Door you ask.
  
  It's one four songs penned solo by Doors guitarist Robby Krieger for the band's fourth studio album, The Soft Parade (Krieger also cowrote "Do It" with frontman Jim Morrison). Krieger said that "Wishful Sinful" is an attempt to dig into the subconsciousness, which can be seen in just-weird-enough verses such as:
  
  Magic
  Risin'
  Sun is shinin' deep beneath the sea
  But not enough for
  You and me and sunshine
  Love to hear the wind cry
  
  The thing is, the words are weird enough to hint at something more, but too vague to indicate exactly what that "more" is. That's probably why most others, including Doors keyboardist Ray Manzarek and notable journalist Gillian G. Gaar, see the song as simply being about love and lust.
• Session musician Harvey Brooks, who made his reputation backing up Bob Dylan on his landmark album Highway 61 Revisited, provided bass on this track. He also helped organize the rhythm tracks on The Soft Parade as a whole.
• Also credited on "Wishful Sinful" is Doug Lubahn, who contributed bass to The Doors' albums Strange Days (1967) and Waiting for the Sun (1968), in addition to The Soft Parade. He's been called "the fifth Door" because Paul Rothchild invited him to join the band during the Strange Days recording sessions. Lubahn turned the offer down out of loyalty to his primary band, Clear Light.
• "Wishful Sinful" was the first and highest-charting single released off The Soft Parade. It hit #44 while "Tell All The People" reached #57 and "Runnin' Blue" got #64.
  
  Even fans of The Doors are surprised to learn that "Wishful Sinful" nearly cracked the Top 40. Morrison's performance is uninspired and unconvincing, to put it mildly, and the song lacks all the mystery and edge that made The Doors legendary. At least some of the song's success can be attributed to the fact that it was released hot on the heels of two smash hits, "Hello, I Love You" and "Touch Me," both of which came off The Doors' third studio album, Waiting for the Sun, just before the band recorded The Soft Parade.
• Writing for Stylus (The Doors: Perception Box Set, December 7, 2006), Todd Burns summed up the general sentiment around "Wishful Sinful" when he called it "perhaps the band's most forgettable track." The song does have its supporters, though. Both of the preceding statements can be said of The Soft Parade as a whole. The Doors had been living a hectic schedule with the success of Waiting for the Sun and hadn't had time to focus on writing. On top of that, Morrison's substance-abuse issues were getting worse, the band was burning out, and producer Paul Rothchild was going off the rails with cocaine. The band added full orchestral arrangements to many of the songs in a move that some considered an interesting experiment but most others considered a lame sellout move that seriously tarnished the band's image.
• "Wishful Sinful" did well in Denmark, where it hit #3.
• The song hit #28 on Cash Box, a onetime competitor of the Billboard Hot 100 that has become the ubiquitous American music chart. In 1992, an incident surrounding Wayne Newton's "The Letter" called into question the integrity of Cash Box. The 2003 cold case work done on the 1989 murder of Kevin Hughes exposed even deeper corruption. Basically, it all amounted to Cash Box being a pay-for-placement operation rather than a legitimate music-sales analyst. So, the entire history of Cash Box is now in question, which might explain why "Wishful Sinful" did so much better there than it did on the Hot 100.