Something's Always Wrong

Album: Dulcinea (1994)
Charted: 41
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Songfacts®:

  • Toad The Wet Sprocket followed up their hit "Fall Down" with this melancholy single that finds lead singer Glen Phillips attempting to keep a relationship together despite something always being wrong. Guitarist Todd Nichols came up with the music and had just one line: "Something has gone wrong."

    "And I kind of lifted that and switched it," Phillips recalled in a 2022 Songfacts interview. Although the lyrics are "an amalgam of a whole bunch of relational observations," they also reflect his inward struggle with intrusive thoughts. He continued: "As a person who struggles a lot with depression and negative ideation, for me that's the state I'm always swimming upstream against: that feeling that something's wrong. It's usually based on a true story, but it's almost never the whole story."
  • By the time they released the fourth album, Dulcinea, Toad The Wet Sprocket was a familiar name on the charts, thanks to the hits "All I Want" and "Walk On The Ocean." The new album notched two more with "Fall Down" and "Something's Always Wrong" - the latter peaking at #9 on the Modern Rock chart and #22 on the Mainstream Rock chart.

    A fortuitous placement thrust them further into the spotlight when the Fear cast-off "Good Intentions" was used on Friends and featured on the show's official soundtrack.
  • Peaking at #41, this was the band's fourth and final entry on the Hot 100.
  • This was used in these TV shows:

    Cold Case ("Stand Up And Holler" - 2007)
    Scrubs ("My Big Brother" - 2002)

    And in these movies:

    Tuesdays With Morrie (1999)
    Fear (1996)

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