Sweet Dreams Explained
Eurythmics’ bold musical experimentation culminated in “Sweet Dreams”—the duo’s biggest hit.
When they wrote “Sweet Dreams,” Annie Lennox and Dave Stewart’s whirlwind romance had ended, but they were still looking for the perfect sound together.
Stewart wrote in his memoir:
This was a weird time in our lives. Annie and I had broke up, but we spent hours and hours together every day in the studio.
Annie Lennox told the New York Times that they wrote the song after having a huge fight.
I thought it was the end of the road and that was that. We were trying to write, and I was miserable. And he just went, well, ‘I’ll do this anyway.
With the help of its iconic video played on the fledgling MTV, the song became a #1 hit on the Billboard Top 100 in the summer of 1983.
Lennox was fighting depression when she wrote these lyrics. She explains their significance in her biography:
The song “Sweet Dreams” is a personal statement about people’s motivations, in their loves, their own dreams. I replaced the word “motivations” with the word “dreams.” I’m saying these are motivations as human beings, and there’s no way, whether I disagree, that I want to change anything about that. And everywhere I look (“I travelled the world, and the seven seas”), all I see is that every person on the earth is looking for that kind of fulfillment. So you have the extremes from the people who want to use and be used, the whole spectrum.
Lennox’s lyrics are somewhat dark since she and Stewart were fighting at the time. Stewart suggested this more upbeat part to strike a balance:
I suggested there had to be another bit, and that bit should be positive. So in the middle we added these chord changes rising upwards with ‘Hold your head up, moving on.’ To us it was a major breakthrough. It just goes from beginning to end and the whole song is a chorus, there is not one note that is not a hook.