Ani DiFranco / My Best Friend's Wedding (Music from the Motion Picture) / 1997
Wishin' and Hopin'
wry, slightly unsettled beneath a sweet surface
This is a cover of the 1964 Dusty Springfield/Burt Bacharach-Hal David pop standard, recorded for a romantic-comedy soundtrack. DiFranco, an artist otherwise known for pointed, self-authored feminist songwriting, takes on a song whose lyric instructs women to win men through passivity and self-adornment, and the friction between singer and material becomes the real subject of the performance.
gender roles and courtship performance versus authorship irony through casting nostalgia and pop revivalism female agency (or its absence)
Who's speaking
The voice is a generic advice-giver addressing an unnamed woman seeking a man's affection; it's a stock 1960s pop-song narrator rather than a personal 'I', which is part of why DiFranco singing it feels loaded.
What happens
There isn't a story arc so much as a repeated instructional loop: wishing and hoping alone won't win him, so the addressee must actively perform affection and appearance to secure his love, and the song insists this formula guarantees success, ending on a triumphant, almost coerced-sounding declaration of belonging to him.
How it's built
Built on tight, incantatory repetition -- verse, refrain, verse, refrain, with the same escalating list of actions (hold, kiss, squeeze, love) recurring nearly verbatim each time. The lack of real musical or lyrical development mirrors the closed logic of the advice being given: there's no room to deviate from the formula, and the song's insistence increases through repetition rather than variation, climaxing in a chanted, almost hypnotic final assertion.
Section by section
Opening verse
The song opens by dismissing internal longing as useless, immediately establishing action as superior to feeling. This sets the transactional logic that governs the rest of the lyric: love is won by doing, not wanting.
First refrain
The advice becomes concrete and physical, reducing courtship to a short sequence of touches and appearances the woman must supply.
Second refrain / appearance instructions
“Wear your hair just for him”
The specific detail about grooming for a man's preference narrows the song's idea of care into self-modification, foregrounding the version of femininity the lyric assumes without ever naming it critically.
Escalating list
Successive verbs pile on top of each other with almost comic insistence, turning affection into a mechanical sequence that guarantees the promised outcome.
Closing chant
“You will be his”
The final repeated line, delivered as near-exultant declaration, completes the transaction: the woman's identity is now defined by belonging to the man. Sung by DiFranco, the line can land as either genuine pop pleasure or a pointed, almost startling closing note given her broader catalog's resistance to exactly this kind of framing.
Craft
- anaphora
- The repeated present-participle stack of longing verbs opens each verse, building a rhythmic incantation that mimics obsessive rumination.
- imperative mood
- The advice section shifts to direct commands, turning the song into a checklist of behaviors, which flattens desire into a to-do list.
- irony of context
- The gap between DiFranco's public persona and the lyric's traditional gender script generates a meta-commentary the original recording never had; the sincerity of the vocal performance versus the datedness of the advice creates tension.
Reading it
The most persuasive reading treats this less as DiFranco's personal statement and more as a soundtrack assignment she inhabits with evident craft but audible distance -- the song's instructions to mold oneself for a man sit oddly against her songwriting identity, and that dissonance is likely the point of casting her at all, whether intentional subversion or simply ironic soundtrack placement. An alternative reading takes the recording at face value: a skilled vocalist doing an affectionate, straight cover of a beloved pop standard, with no irony intended, for a film that trades in old-fashioned romantic tropes on purpose.
Context
'Wishin' and Hopin'' was written by Burt Bacharach and Hal David and made famous by Dusty Springfield in 1964. DiFranco's version appears on the soundtrack to the 1997 film My Best Friend's Wedding, which uses several classic pop covers by contemporary artists. I don't have reliable details on the specific recording session or DiFranco's stated intentions in choosing or being chosen for this song.
Listen for
- how closely DiFranco's phrasing sticks to or departs from Dusty Springfield's original delivery
- whether the vocal tone reads as sincere, playful, or knowingly ironic
- the way repetition without musical variation builds pressure toward the final chant
- any vocal inflection on the appearance-focused lines that might signal distance from the lyric's content
About Ani DiFranco
Angela Maria "Ani" DiFranco is an American-Canadian singer-songwriter. She has released more than 20 albums.
b. 1970 / United States
Full biography and catalogue