What Do I Have to Do?

A band composition, the lyric was written by Stabbing Westward frontman Christopher Hall, and it's a personal one, expressing his anguish over his marriage falling about while he was on the road touring. "It's a song of frustration," he said in a Songfacts interview. "Just the willingness to do anything to try and make somebody love you again after they've fallen out of love with you. And I think I can tell you with great certainty that there's nothing you can do! I think Lyle Lovett said it best in a song: 'She's Already Made Up Her Mind'... and there's nothing you can do to change that."

A track from Stabbing Westward's second major-label album, Wither Blister Burn & Peel, "What Do I Have to Do?" was their first song to get much airplay and their first to crack the Billboard charts, reaching #7 on the Modern Rock tally. Their brand of industrial music was having a moment in 1996, led by Nine Inch Nails and Marilyn Manson.

The music video did well on MTV2, which launched in 1996 as a more adventurous alternative to the original and a commitment to music videos. The video takes place in a desert with lots of saturation and fish-eye. We see the band performing (where do they plug in?) amidst shot of Hall and a brooding love interest. At the end of the video, it appears he has killed her by running her over in a car.