Would I Lie To You Album: Be Yourself Tonight (1985)
Sweet Dreams Album: Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This) (1982)
Sexcrime Nineteen Eighty Four Album: 1984 (For the Love of Big Brother) (1984)
by Eurythmics
For Eurythmics third album, Dave Stewart set out to make a "killer R&B riff." He found it one morning when he was having breakfast with his acoustic guitar on his knee. He took the riff to Annie Lennox, who wasn't sure about it at first, since it didn't fit their sound.
As Stewart explained in The Dave Stewart Songbook: "When we started putting it down Would I Lie To You had a lot of energy and inspired Annie to come up with the great lyric, 'Would I Lie To You" and a melody with very odd answering harmonies, 'Now, would I say something that wasn't true.' These harmonies are very unusual and Annie is a genius at working them out very quickly in her head. The song started to be a fusion between Stax type R&B and Eurythmics."
Lennox sings this from the perspective of an angry girlfriend who walks out on her cheating lover. It was not directed at Stewart, although they were a romantic couple before forming Eurythmics, but inspired by the breakup of her first marriage, to a Hare Krishna named Radha Raman.
"I was always looking for a good relationship, and you can see it in the songs, all this unrequited love," Lennox told Q magazine regarding her songwriting during this period. "I was never in one spot, so my emotions were in turmoil."
Eurythmics recorded Be Yourself Tonight in a small room they set as a recording studio in the suburbs of Paris. Lennox and Stewart lived in apartments on top of each other while they were making the album.
Benmont Tench from Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers played the Hammond organ on Would I Lie To You; he and Stewart previously worked together on "Don't Come Around Here No More." Martin Dobson was brought in for horns.
In the book Annie Lennox: The Biography, Lennox explained that Sweet Dreams is about the search for fulfillment, and the "Sweet Dreams" are the desires that motivate us.
"Sweet Dreams" is a song of contrasts, with a heart-pumping beat but a lyric that carries a dark undercurrent. Listeners have adapted it accordingly. In a 2022 Songfacts interview with Dave Stewart of Eurythmics, he explained: "A lot of people use it as a very uplifting dance record at EDM festivals and raves and parties. When the DJ puts that on there's always a lot of hands in the air. But it's actually a very sort of existential, spooky record asking if this is what the world has come to. Is this what our dreams are made of? And then some people want to use you, some want to abuse you. So it goes into a topic that could go massive if you want it to. Eurythmics songs always had a bit of that in it, a juxtaposition between the music and the lyric."
"I suppose it was reality, basically, what we were writing about," he added. "It wasn't a Disney kind of world."
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