Want One - Songs

Songs

The album's opener, "Oh What a World", has been described as a "choir of harmonies building to a full orchestra that finds Wainwright leading what can only be described as "a masterpiece of horns, harmonies and hope". "I Don't Know What It Is", the album's first single, "climbs to a soaring Beatles-esque climax of train rides". Wainwright revealed the source and meaning of the song:

When I first came up with the lines, I don't know what it is, but you got to do it/ I don't know where to go but you got to be there, I was at this party for The Strokes in New York. There was this prevailing sense of, 'We're not quite sure what's happening or what is cool, but we know that it's somewhere around here, in this room.' It was this vague confusion, with everybody kind of sniffing for blood. It wasn't that it was a bad party, or that I don't like The Strokes; I just think there's a lot of confusion right now in the music business. Then, later on, I realized the song was really personal. I didn't know where I was, and I didn't know I was actually lost. It wasn't about the party at all; it's about searching but not knowing what you're searching for. There's the train motif, being on this train heading for either oblivion or salvation – and just holding on for dear life. That song came down from some mountain somewhere, because it was right after I wrote it that I sort of packed it in.

"Vicious World", which features "soft, Björkian keyboards and twinkling electronic sounds" and "sounds like it's got about 350 multi-tracked vocals", has been characterized by Wainwright as "one of those happy/sad songs", referring to the song's joyous sound but negative lyrics. Wainwright said the following of "Movies of Myself", with its "straight-ahead bounce, drum-led clip, and aberrant guitar crunch":

The song is about knowing the end result of every situation you're in, and being able to play it out in your mind and see it before it happens. It's about addiction, really, about knowing how it's all going to end up. In that sense, you're watching a movie of yourself all the time – and then you want out of that movie.

Slant Magazine's Sal Cinquemani described "Go or Go Ahead" as a "multi-tiered, emotionally-charged epic that could pass for a paranoid Radiohead song".