In an alternate world, we might be playing Roxette’s “It Must Have Been Love” with regularity every December once Christmas music starts to dominate. Believe it or not, the song was written with the intent of it being a seasonal staple.
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Fate determined that it instead would become a touching evocation of heartbreak, no matter what time of year it’s played. Here’s how Roxette created “It Must Have Been Love,” and how a romantic comedy made it a worldwide smash.
A Yuletide Origin
Per Gessle and Marie Fredriksson, a pair of Swedish musicians who were longtime friends and sometime collaborators through the late ’70s and early ’80s, decided to team up as Roxette in 1986. Since they each had already built a solid reputation in their home country, their first album proved an immediate success in Sweden, spinning out three hit singles.
In 1987, they were asked by the German branch of their record label (EMI) to record a Christmas single, thinking that might be the way they would gain some footing in that country. Gessle, the songwriter for Roxette, accepted the challenge and came up with what was originally called “It Must Have Been Love (Christmas for the Broken Hearted).”
Perhaps Gessle had some kind of second sight about the song’s potential. Aside from the title, a few seasonal musical touches in the intro, and a single mention of Christmas in the lyrics, there isn’t much in that original version to suggest it was intended as a holiday song.
Ironically, the song failed to catch fire in Germany, although it did give the band another Swedish hit. In 1989, Roxette’s second album Look Sharp arrived, and it once again sold like crazy in their native country. Little did they know they were about to get the big break that made them more of a worldwide concern.
A fan of theirs who had visited Sweden returned to the U.S. and brought a copy of Look Sharp to his local DJ, who began playing the song “The Look.” It caught fire in that market, and swept through others one by one until it was on top of the U.S. charts.
That put Roxette in place to capitalize when the producers of an American romantic comedy coming out in 1990 were looking for a heart-tugging ballad to place in their film. Roxette touched up “It Must Have Been Love,” changing the Christmas lyric and altering the mix slightly. That film: Pretty Woman, which became a runway hit. So did “It Must Have Been Love,” which went to No. 1 in 1990, the band’s third chart-topper in America.
What is the Meaning of “It Must Have Been Love”?
“It Must Have Been Love” details that perilous limbo reached once a relationship has gone past the point of no return but hasn’t yet completely dissolved. The narrator begins by asking her partner for a bit of mercy: Lay a whisper on my pillow / Leave the winter on the ground. She bemoans the air of silence surrounding them, so much so that she tries to escape reality: I dream away.
In the second verse, she resorts to magical thinking to cope: Make-believing we’re together / That I’m sheltered by your heart. The chorus finds her trying to make sense of all that’s come before: It must have been love / But it’s over now / It must have been good / But I lost it somehow.
As the song progresses, the opportunities increase for Marie Fredriksson to take the lyrics and get inside them, displaying the full range of emotions overcoming this character. Thank goodness that Per Gessle didn’t go overboard with the seasonal trappings when he first wrote “It Must Have Been Love.” This Roxette song might have been lost to some arcane Christmas playlist instead of becoming a weeper for the masses.
Photo by kpa/United Archives via Getty Images
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