This 1983 Earworm Was Written Just as This Synth-Pop Duo Was About To Call It Quits

As any habitual procrastinator can attest, sometimes the most powerful inspiration comes in the eleventh hour, which was apparently the case for one of the biggest synth-pop earworms of 1983, “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)”. Despite the song’s infectious synth hooks and driving drum tracks, Annie Lennox, vocalist and one-half of Eurythmics, said she wrote the lyrics for the song in a state of “hopeless nihilism” in a 2017 interview with The Guardian.

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“We’d come out of the end of The Tourists battered and bruised,” Lennox explained. (The Tourists was the group Lennox and Dave Stewart were in before they formed Eurythmics.) “We were massively in debt, and I’d come across some real monsters in the music business. I’d lived in so many bedsits and was desperately unhappy. We’d survived, kinda, but it was tough. I felt like we were in a dream world, that whatever we were chasing was never going to happen.”

With this context, Lennox’s lyrics take on a whole new meaning. “Sweet dreams are made of this / Who am I to disagree? / I travel the world and the seven seas / Everybody’s looking for something.”

Amidst her and Stewart’s “looking for something,” the singer lamented, “Some of them want to use you / Some of them want to get used by you / Some of them want to abuse you / Some of them want to be abused.”

Annie Lennox Was Close to Quitting Eurythmics When They Wrote Their 1983 Smash Hit

Eurythmics’ “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)” was a smash success. Released on January 21, 1983, the song was the synth-pop’s international breakthrough hit. The catchy single topped the Billboard Hot 100 in the States and enjoyed Top 10 success in Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and throughout Europe. If Eurythmics were throwing their final Hail Mary pass, it worked.

And as Lennox would later explain in an interview with Dan Rather, that’s about how it felt at the time. “On the day that we started to create this song, ‘Sweet Dreams’, I was in a terrible mood. I was ready to pack it in and to go back to Scotland. I had realized that there was no hope whatsoever, and it wasn’t going to happen. That was the mood I was in. I was really depressed about it.”

“Dave [Stewart], he’s a very bouillant individual. He’s like, ‘Okay, you’re down, okay. But ah well, you won’t mind, will you, if I just go and do this.’ So, he started to program a drum beat. I was sitting, sort of mooching in the corner of the studio we had. I heard him doing this and thought, ‘Hmm. That’s interesting.’”

With Lennox now at the keyboard, she and Stewart continued to build upon their synth-pop track until they had the makings of “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)”. Lennox told Rather the title was actually “self-deprecating” in the beginning—a sort of sardonic, ‘Look, this is what you asked for. Here it is,’ kind of lyric.

Little did Lennox know at the time how close she was to actually achieving the sweet dreams she longed for that day in the studio.

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