The record in context

Some songs are written; this one was weathered into existence. Eurythmics were staying at the Mayflower Hotel in New York City — some recollections say the Columbus Hotel — on an overcast day, in the middle of a songwriting retreat that had just produced an argument between Annie Lennox and Dave Stewart. Stewart was idly playing melancholy A-minor chords with a stray B-natural on a Casio keyboard. Lennox looked out at the grey skies and the Manhattan skyline, and the lyric crystallised around the argument they had just had: “Here comes the rain again.” Stewart later said the words arrived almost complete, as if the weather and the quarrel had conspired to dictate them. It became their fifth consecutive UK Top 10 single (No. 8) and their second US Top 10, peaking at No. 4 on the Billboard Hot 100 in March 1984 after a 20-week chart run.

The recording is a study in making grandeur out of chaos. Stewart wanted real strings — an arrangement by Michael Kamen, the composer who would go on to score Brazil and Die Hard — performed by players from the British Philharmonic Orchestra. The problem was the studio: The Church Studios in London were still under construction. So the cellists recorded in a corridor, the violinists in the kitchen, the violists in the bathroom, with cables and microphones snaking through the building up to a Soundcraft mixing console perched at the top of a spiral staircase. The orchestral tracks were then blended over the original synth backing of programmed drums and sequencers, with Stewart adding a Gretsch Country Club guitar played with a Bigsby tremolo arm for extra shimmer. It should have been a disaster. It sounds like weather made audible.

The single was released in January 1984 — the third UK single from Touch, but the first American single, a transatlantic strategy that tells you how carefully Eurythmics were now being managed. The full five-minute version was edited down for the Touch album itself; the unedited original didn’t appear on an album until the US Greatest Hits in 1991, which means that for eight years, the definitive version of one of their biggest hits existed only on the 12-inch single. The music video, directed by Stewart with Jonathan Gershfield and Jon Roseman and filmed in December 1983, was shot on the Orkney Islands in Scotland: Lennox performing in and around a scuppered shipwreck while Stewart films her with a video camera, as if stalking her. Grey skies, grey seas, grey ship — the video understood the song better than any lyric sheet could.

Decades later, the duo performed an unplugged version at the 46664 concert in Cape Town in 2003, stripping away the sequencers and the corridor-strings to reveal what had been there all along: a great, sad, simple song about watching something you love get rained on. Arguments end. Weather passes. But the songs written in the middle of both have a way of outlasting the conditions that produced them. “Here Comes the Rain Again” is Eurythmics’ most autumnal record — the sound of two people who fought in a hotel room and turned the fight into something beautiful enough to play at weddings.

The song’s afterlife has been unusually dignified. In 2003, the duo performed an unplugged version at the 46664 concert in Cape Town — the AIDS-benefit concert organized by Nelson Mandela’s foundation — stripping away the sequencers and the corridor-strings to reveal the stark, sad song underneath. It worked completely, which tells you something about the composition’s bones: remove every 1983 production signature and the song still stands. And the full five-minute version — the unedited original — didn’t appear on any album until the American Greatest Hits in 1991, meaning the definitive text of one of their biggest hits was a ghost for eight years, available only to those who owned the 12-inch.

There’s a footnote to the recording that captures the Eurythmics method perfectly: alongside the orchestra and the sequencers, Stewart played a Gretsch Country Club guitar through a Bigsby tremolo arm, adding a shimmer that sits somewhere between rockabilly and dream-pop. It’s barely noticeable in the final mix — a texture, not a feature — but it’s the kind of detail Stewart specialized in: the unexpected element that makes a production feel handmade rather than manufactured. Corridor cellists, kitchen violins, a tremolo guitar, a Casio keyboard, an argument in a hotel room. Pop music’s strangest recipe, and it baked into something timeless.

Listen closely

Start with the opening, because the opening is a masterclass in atmosphere. Those first bars — the low synth pulse, the sense of something gathering — don’t sound like the beginning of a pop song. They sound like weather moving in. Stewart’s production here is a long way from the stark minimalism of “Sweet Dreams”: this is maximalist melancholy, layer upon layer of synthesizer and sequencer building a sky heavy enough to rain from. And then Lennox enters — “Here comes the rain again” — and her voice does something remarkable: it sounds resigned and defiant at the same time, as if she’s both surrendering to the storm and daring it to do its worst.

Then the strings arrive, and this is where you should really pay attention. Remember the conditions: cellists in a corridor, violinists in a kitchen. You’d expect the result to sound cramped or thin. Instead, Kamen’s arrangement gives the song its vast, aching scale — those long, falling lines that seem to descend from a great height. The genius of the production is how the orchestral and electronic elements don’t compete but complete each other: the synths provide the pulse and the gloom, the strings provide the human ache inside the gloom. Listen to the way the violins enter under “falling on my head like a memory” — it’s the song’s emotional thesis stated instrumentally, before Lennox even sings the words.

Listen next for the lyric’s quiet devastation. “Talk to me like lovers do” — it’s a plea disguised as a memory, and Lennox sings it with a tenderness that makes the surrounding cold feel colder by contrast. The song’s great trick is that it’s ostensibly about rain but actually about the aftermath of an argument: that specific, heavy silence when two people have said the worst things and now have to live in the weather they’ve created. “And I want to walk in the open wind” isn’t escapism; it’s the desire to feel something clean after something messy. Lennox, who had just lived the argument the song describes, sings every line like someone who knows exactly how this ends — and is singing it anyway.

Finally, listen to the full-length version if you can find it — the five-minute 12-inch rather than the album edit. The extra bars aren’t filler; they’re atmosphere, the storm given room to fully develop. In the extended passages, you can hear the full scope of what Stewart was building: not a pop single with strings attached, but a genuine fusion of electronic and orchestral thinking, years before that became fashionable. The rain in the title isn’t a metaphor for sadness. It’s a metaphor for the thing that comes whether you want it or not, that soaks everyone equally, that you can’t argue with. Some songs you dance to. This one you stand in.

Listen for the Gretsch, if you can isolate it — that tremolo shimmer floating somewhere in the midrange, neither quite guitar nor quite synthesizer. It’s Stewart’s signature move: the organic detail buried in the electronic landscape, the human fingerprint on the machine. Without it, the track might be merely impressive. With it, the track breathes. This is what separated Eurythmics from their synth-pop peers: where others pursued purity of concept, Stewart pursued impurity, always smuggling something warm and wooden into the circuitry.

And listen to the tension between the programmed and the played. The drums are sequenced — rigid, unyielding, metronomic — while the strings are human, with all the micro-variation of bowed instruments recorded in a corridor. The song lives in the friction between those two time-feels: the machine’s perfection against the humans’ imperfection. Most 1980s productions tried to hide the seam between electronic and acoustic. “Here Comes the Rain Again” makes the seam the subject. The rain falls on everyone equally — the programmed and the played, the certain and the lost.