The 1990s File Feature
Not Enough Time
Not Enough Time: INXS and the Bittersweet Final Chapter A Band on the Cusp of Something Else When Not Enough Time climbed the Billboard Hot 100 through the a…
01 The Story
Not Enough Time: INXS and the Bittersweet Final Chapter
A Band on the Cusp of Something Else
When Not Enough Time climbed the Billboard Hot 100 through the autumn of 1992, INXS were navigating a transitional moment in their career with characteristic grace and complexity. The band had peaked commercially in the late 1980s on the strength of Kick, the 1987 album that produced four top-ten American singles and established Michael Hutchence as one of the era's most magnetic frontmen. Their 1990 follow-up, X, had performed well but not at the same stratospheric level. Welcome to Wherever You Are, the album that contained Not Enough Time, was their most adventurous record in years, a genuine creative stretch that suggested a band willing to evolve rather than repeat.
Welcome to Wherever You Are: The Ambitious 1992 Record
Welcome to Wherever You Are was recorded in Sydney and incorporated a wider sonic palette than any previous INXS album. The band worked with string arrangements and more textured production approaches, moving away from the lean, funk-influenced rock that had defined Kick toward something more orchestral and atmospheric. Andrew Farriss, the primary songwriter and musical architect of the band, pushed the arrangements in directions that were not always safe commercial choices, and the album reflected a confidence born of having already conquered the commercial peak.
Not Enough Time was one of the more accessible tracks on this adventurous album. The song retained the rhythmic energy that was the band's signature while incorporating the more lush production aesthetic of the wider record. Hutchence's vocal was particularly assured, the mix of sexual charisma and genuine emotional depth that had always been his most distinctive quality working in perfect concert with a lyric about the insufficiency of time when one is happy.
Charting Through the Fall of 1992
The single debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 on August 22, 1992, entering at number 72. Its climb through the chart was steady and sure-footed: from 72 to 57 to 46 to 37 to 32 through the first month, then continuing upward through September and into October. It peaked at number 28 on October 10, 1992, spending 15 weeks on the chart in total. The result placed it among the band's more consistent American performers from this period and demonstrated that their post-Kick audience remained engaged with the band's evolving sound.
In Australia and the United Kingdom, where INXS remained enormously popular, the song performed even better, and the accompanying album went to number 1 in Australia, confirming that the band's creative choices were being rewarded in their home market even as the global commercial landscape had shifted since the Kick peak.
The Shadow of What Would Come
It is impossible, writing about INXS in 1992, to avoid the knowledge of what followed. Michael Hutchence died in November 1997, and the band has continued in various configurations since. The INXS of 1992, releasing ambitious, genuinely good music and still performing at an extremely high level, was a band with what appeared to be a substantial future. Not Enough Time and Welcome to Wherever You Are represent them in that forward-looking phase, confident in their craft and interested in where it could take them.
Why the Song Holds Up
The track's endurance comes partly from Hutchence's vocal performance and partly from the song's melodic strength. A good melody outlasts its production context, and Not Enough Time has one. Strip away the 1992 production and the underlying song remains compelling; that is the test that separates solid work from period-specific content.
Listen to the way Hutchence inhabits the chorus, and you will hear a singer at the height of his considerable powers.
"Not Enough Time" — INXS's singular moment on the 1990s charts.
02 Song Meaning
Not Enough Time: The Luxury Problem of Too Much Happiness
When the Complaint Is Abundance
There is a paradox at the emotional core of Not Enough Time: the narrator's problem is not the absence of what he wants but the excess of it. He is so happy, so fully engaged with the person and experience he has found, that the available hours feel insufficient to contain the feeling. This is one of the most interesting emotional positions available to a love song, because it refuses the conventions of romantic longing, which typically involve separation or loss. The ache here is the ache of fullness, of life so good that its finitude becomes perceptible.
Hutchence as an Interpreter of Desire
Michael Hutchence had a particular gift for conveying desire without reducing it to its crudest components. His vocal performances at their best operated in the register of longing: not simple wanting, but the more complex experience of wanting something already partially possessed, of being aware simultaneously of presence and impermanence. Not Enough Time engaged this gift directly. The lyric's premise, that even the best experiences are shadowed by their own eventual ending, suited a vocal character that had always sounded most alive when navigating the border between having and losing.
Time as the Enemy of Joy
The philosophical content of the song, though the word "philosophical" makes it sound more abstract than it feels in the listening, is about time as the fundamental constraint on human experience. The lyric addresses a recurring element of emotional life: that moments of genuine happiness are accompanied, however faintly, by the awareness of their own passing. This is not pessimism; it is the condition of consciousness applied to joy. The song does not suggest that joy is therefore not worth having; it suggests that the insufficiency of time is the price of having found something worth wanting more of.
The Band's Adventurous 1992 Context
The production context of Welcome to Wherever You Are gave Not Enough Time a sonic richness that a leaner INXS production might not have supported. The orchestral elements on the wider album created an expectation of emotional depth that the track fulfilled. Andrew Farriss's songwriting had always been more formally adventurous than the band's commercial profile sometimes suggested, and this period represented him working at the outer edge of his compositional ambitions. The result was a more complex emotional landscape than straightforward rock arrangements would have produced.
What the Song Offers Now
Returning to Not Enough Time in the contemporary moment is to encounter a song that has aged well precisely because its emotional content is not tied to a specific historical context. The experience of happiness bounded by time's limits is not a 1992 experience; it is a permanent feature of human emotional life. INXS captured something in this track that transcends its production era, which is the quality that separates music that lasts from music that merely documents its moment.
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