Songfacts®:

• In this song, White Lion frontman Mike Tramp tries to keep his girl from walking out on him. His plea: "I never had a chance to love you." We never find out if the girl gives him another chance, but by the end of the song he's begging her to come back.
  
  In a Songfacts interview with Tramp, he explained that there was no particular girl that inspired it. When the group's guitarist, Vito Bratta, played him the intro, he knew what he had to do.
  
  "I just sang, 'Wait,'" Tramp said. "There was really no way out of that song that said, 'I'm gonna write this song about Lord Of The Rings or something else.' It had to be a plain and simple breakup/love song. The title says it all."
• "Wait" was the first hit for White Lion, a band that came together when Mike Tramp, born and raised in Denmark, came to New York City and met Vito Bratta. Their first album, Fight To Survive, was released in America on an indie label in 1986, but they soon landed a deal with Atlantic Records, which put out their second album, Pride, in 1987, with "Wait" the first single.
  
  Radio stations gradually added the song to their playlists, but it really took off when MTV started playing the video - White Lion had a great look and Tramp could smolder as well as any hair metal frontman this side of Jon Bon Jovi. The song peaked at #8 in the US in May 1988, almost a year after it was released.
• White Lion followed "Wait" with the rocker "Tell Me," which stalled at #58 in the US. But the next single, the ballad "When The Children Cry," was huge, climbing to #3 in the US. The Pride album went on to sell over 2 million copies, but the band spent nearly two years on the road promoting it. When it came time to make their next album, they came under pressure from their record company and rushed it. That album, Big Game, was poorly reviewed and didn't have any big hits. The band put out another album in 1991 but broke up a year later.
• White Lion guitarist Vito Bratta pulled off some impressive fretwork on the solo, earning him comparisons to Eddie Van Halen. His playing helped distinguish White Lion from the pack of hair metal bands of the era that included Poison, Mötley Crüe, and Cinderella. When White Lion broke up, Bratta pretty much vanished. He later explained that he stepped away from music to care for his ailing father, and then a wrist injury kept him from playing at a high level. He and Mike Tramp beefed when Tramp started using the White Lion name on various projects. They never reunited, but did settle into a cordial business relationship.
• The girl in the video is Christie Muhaw, a model who used the name Christy Angelica as a member of a dance music group called The Flirts. She appears on their 1984 album Made In America. Muhaw died in a car accident in 1989 at 24.