Spin Doctors / Pocket Full of Kryptonite (20th Anniversary Edition) / 1991
How Could You Want Him (When You Know You Can Have Me?)
wry, aggrieved, half-mocking self-pity
A jealous suitor's pitch disguised as a riddle, this song stacks literary and religious allusions into a case for why he deserves the girl over his shallow rival. The argument never really resolves into logic -- it's more a mood of wounded, self-mythologizing pleading set to a loose, jam-rock groove.
romantic rivalry self-mythologizing religious and literary allusion as deflection class/status anxiety obsessive desire
Who's speaking
A first-person narrator addresses a woman directly, arguing his case against an unnamed rival; he's an unreliable advocate for himself, more interested in sounding clever and wounded than in making a coherent argument
What happens
The song opens with the narrator casting himself as a tragic, literary figure willing to risk everything, then spends its verses piling up contrasts between himself (elevated, suffering, angelic) and his rival (shallow, materialistic, earthbound). The chorus keeps returning to the same rhetorical question. By the end the verses fall away entirely and the song dissolves into pure repetition of the title's plea, as if the argument has exhausted itself and all that's left is the want itself.
How it's built
Verse-chorus structure with a loosely narrative bridge, but the song's real shape is accumulation: each verse adds another allusive image rather than advancing an argument. The final third abandons new verses altogether, looping the chorus and then stripping even that down to a single repeated fragment, mirroring the narrator's descent from rhetoric into raw insistence.
Section by section
Opening verse
“a matter of Cain and Abel”
The narrator frames the rivalry in biblical and literary terms immediately, inflating a romantic triangle into something mythic. The intimate detail of a knee under the table grounds the grandiosity in something physical and almost comic.
First chorus
The central question is posed plainly here, contrasting the rival's superficiality with the narrator's implied depth. The logic is thin by design -- it's less an argument than a taunt.
Second verse
“I'm on my deathbed bleeding with the Cherubims”
The pigeon imagery paints the rival as scrappy and money-minded, while the narrator escalates his own self-image to near-martyrdom. The disproportion between the two registers is where the song's humor lives.
Bridge
The tone shifts toward something more vulnerable and less combative, with imagery of falling stars and rooftops suggesting real emotional risk or self-destructive temptation, briefly letting sincerity through before the rivalry resumes.
Final verse
Saints, quills, and wills continue the pattern of ornate allusion, but the imagery grows more cryptic and less clearly aimed at the rival, suggesting the narrator's rhetoric is starting to spin for its own sake.
Outro
The song sheds its verses and even its rival, collapsing into bare repetition of the core plea. What began as clever argument ends as plain, almost desperate assertion of desire.
Craft
- allusion
- References to Hamlet's courtiers, Cain and Abel, angelic hierarchies (Seraphim, Cherubim), and Saint Christopher are used not for thematic depth but as status markers -- the narrator name-drops to seem erudite and tragic, which is itself a form of characterization.
- juxtaposition
- The rival is consistently paired with lowly, transactional imagery (pigeons pecking for pennies, wine bought with a cheap bill) while the narrator claims celestial suffering, sharpening the contrast he's trying to draw between them.
- irony
- The narrator's claim to spiritual superiority is undercut by how petty and self-serving his actual complaint is -- he wants the girl, not virtue, and dresses jealousy up as cosmic injustice.
- refrain/erosion
- The chorus question repeats throughout, but by the song's end it's stripped of its question mark and rival entirely, leaving only the bare demand, as if persuasion has given way to insistence.
Reading it
The most persuasive reading treats this as a comic character study: a narrator who uses erudition and religious grandeur to mask simple jealousy and insecurity, with the song's gradual stripping-down to bare repetition exposing the thinness of his case. An alternative reading takes the religious imagery more seriously, as genuine meditation on worthiness and spiritual versus material love -- but the playful, overstuffed quality of the allusions (Hamlet next to Cain and Abel next to seraphim) makes earnestness hard to sustain throughout.
Context
This track appears on Spin Doctors' 1991 debut album Pocket Full of Kryptonite, better known for 'Two Princes' and 'Little Miss Can't Be Wrong.' The band's style blended jam-band looseness with pop songcraft, and this song fits that mold -- a loquacious, image-dense lyric riding a groove-driven arrangement rather than a tightly structured pop form. I don't have specific biographical or compositional background on this particular song beyond what the lyric itself shows.
Listen for
- How the allusions pile up faster than the song can meaningfully use them, creating a sense of verbal excess
- The shift in tone during the bridge, where the imagery turns toward vulnerability rather than rivalry
- How the arrangement likely lets the groove carry the song's momentum while the lyrics digress
- The way the chorus's wording narrows and repeats at the end, losing its question mark
- The comic undertone in pairing celestial imagery with mundane financial details like pigeons and cheap wine
About Spin Doctors
Spin Doctors are an American alternative rock band from New York City, best known for their early 1990s hits "Two Princes" and "Little Miss Can't Be Wrong", which peaked on the Billboard Hot 100 chart at No. 7 and No.
1988 - present / United States
Full biography and catalogue