Diane Warren Inspired What Became One of Jo Dee Messina’s Biggest Hits

In 2003, Jo Dee Messina had a Top 15 hit with “I Wish”. The song, written by Tommy Lee James and Ed Hill, is the only single released from Messina’s Greatest Hits album.

“I Wish” is a song about wishing someone well, even amid the hurt from a relationship that has ended. The heartfelt lyrics say in part, “I wish you strength / When times are hard / Oh, I wish with all my heart / You find just what you’re looking for / I wish you joy / I wish you peace / And that every star you see is within your reach / And I wish you still loved me.“

At the time, “I Wish” wasn’t based on anything either James or Hill were going through. Instead, James reveals the two writers were trying to channel another hit songwriter when writing “I Wish”. 

“We wrote that song when Diane Warren was just dominating the charts,” James tells Songfacts. “I just wanted to write a song like a Diane Warren song, just like a classic song that had some modulations in it, and an inspirational lyric. In Nashville we’re always looking for the way to turn a song around, turn a hook around. I don’t do that very much; I pretty much write really straight hooks.”

James also says that “I Wish” is like the Irish blessing, “May The Road Rise To Meet You”.

“‘I wish this, I wish you all the best,’ and all that stuff,” James adds. “But then at the end it says, ‘I wish you still loved me.’ So I was just trying to turn it around.”

What Tommy Lee James Says About Writing “I Wish” for Jo Dee Messina

James admits that the way he wrote “I Wish” may not be typical for most songwriters, even though it works for him.

 “I came up with that literally five minutes before I walked in to write with Ed. And he liked it,” James recalls. “That’s generally my way of doing it. I’m frantically trying to think of something to write on my way to my writing appointment, so I don’t have to go in empty-handed. That’s basically my mode of operation. Sometimes it’s best to work under pressure.”

“I guess I’m different from a lot of Nashville writers where you write too many songs, and you’re on … a hamster wheel,” he adds. “It’s just hard to find time to sit down and go, ‘Okay, I’m going to write a song about this. Here’s what I want to say.’ For me, it doesn’t normally happen like that where there’s a story – like a puzzle story behind the song.”

After “I Wish”, Messina returned to No. 1 with “My Give A Damn’s Busted”. Her final Top 40 single came in 2008, with a song called “I’m Done”.

James has numerous other songwriting credits besides “I Wish”. He is also the writer behind Gary Allan’s “Life Ain’t Always Beautiful”, Ronnie Dunn’s “Bleed Red”, and Blake Shelton and Gwen Stefani’s “Nobody But You” duet, among others.

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