Where I Wait

Notes

Kurt Uenala and Dave Gahan have been working together since 2010, and own a studio, Schtudio Blanco, together since 2012. They have written several unreleased songs together since then. In a 2017 interview, Kurt Uenala said "Maybe one day I'll release [my unreleased songs] for kicks." The song 'Where I Wait' was probably written in 2011.

Dave Gahan said in a syndicated interview with Marcel Anders in March 2013:

"Kurt was working with me in the studio, engineering and recording the vocals for me for Soulsavers ['The Light The Dead See', 2012]. Once I've written the idea I would go into the studio in New York and Kurt recorded all my vocals for that record. And whilst we were recording, we started to play around with ideas. He said one day: 'I have this kind of melody idea'. And I said: 'Well, give it to me and let's see what happens'. And really it was something that he, it was just going to be for himself. He goes under the name Kaptain Kurt. And it's instrumental based electronics. And he's done some remixes – I think – for me in the past and also for the band. We're friends and he gave me this thing. And I wrote a song to it, and we recorded it. And so in between doing Soulsavers things we began demoing songs. Really after three or four, I said: 'You know, I think, I know you wanted to maybe use this for your own project. But if you’re interested I'd like to play some of these songs to my band'. And so that's what happened."

Kurt Uenala said in a press release for 'Cryosleep' in 2017:

"I wrote [the song] with Dave in mind. He wrote the melody and lyrics soon after he was sick, which I think influenced the reflective tone."

In October 2012, Depeche Mode released an EPK for Delta Machine which shows them working in Chung King Studios, in which a whiteboard can be seen with all of Delta Machine's working titles. One of those titles is 'Wait'. HOME admin PeterToo said that another title for that track was 'Where I Wait'. Presumably, the rest of Depeche Mode and producer Ben Hillier rejected this track.

Kurt Uenala wrote on Facebook:

"[...] Every free minute I had (I still had a full time day job back then) was spent working hard on my own music and that meant many lonely nights tweaking and perfecting ideas in the studio. I stumbled over a synth riff that was just perfect for Dave’s baritone. So I asked if he would maybe, possibly, perhaps have a listen. He really liked the song sketch and had melody and lyric ideas immediately. Dave worked on the melody and lyrics alone so I heard the melody for the first time over the phone. After changing some chords and shortening the arrangement, we recorded the lead vocal for the demo and Dave sent it to his manager, Jonathan Kessler, who was suggesting we continue to write songs, which we still do whenever Dave is not busy taking over the world with his unstoppable DM gang. The song was never properly recorded so last Fall, after the 'Spirit' sessions, we decided to finish the track and spent quite some time getting the energy right. We stripped the arrangement down, changed the drum programming a bit, Sharin Foo sang backing vocals and then Dave added a sad synthesizer line in the outro and breakdown."

A documentary about Kurt's album 'Cryosleep' has also been released, in which Dave and Kurt can be seen working on the song, in late 2016. You can watch it here.

Dave Gahan told Billboard:

"The lyric is really about unconditional love, us all wanting that and wanting that for the world - until it becomes conditional, and then of course it turns into hate, murder and violence. It's not necessarily inwards, not necessarily anything that's going on with me, but it's what I feel like is happening around me. There's all this bullshit going on, but it's just all this diversion. Don't really pay attention to whats going on, just make some more fakeness. We're supposed to all just bury our heads in our cell phones and pretend nothing's happening, and that's what happens with love if you don't pay attention. If you don't really take care of it and share it, it will go away.”

Dave Gahan elaborated on it to Rolling Stone:

"It's a song about unconditional love. Once that love becomes conditional, hate takes over and death and murder follows. And that's really what [director] Tim Saccenti, who made the amazing video for this song, picked up on. In the video, there's a girl and a guy; she wants him, she gets him, she loves him. Maybe he loves her and then that turns into something different and she can't have him anymore, so she murders him. It goes beyond rage. Of course we don't all do that, but it's human nature. It's like something takes over when you can't own something; you kind of want to destroy it. I mean, it's kind of how my mind thinks, but things like that is what's happening in the world right now. Things just seem like chaos out there and we're all just sucking it up rather than throwing up our arms and going, 'What the fuck is happening?' I can't even look at my phone anymore because it's like one diversion to the next. Music, to me, is still the savior and the communicator. What Kurt and I made went to a cool place because Kurt built a new atmosphere around the song. It worked very cinematically."

Dates where Where I Wait was played

Where I Wait has never been played live.