The record in context

Before “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)” made Eurythmics famous, there was a song that almost killed them first. “Love Is a Stranger” was released in October 1982 as the fifth Eurythmics single, the opening track of the album that would eventually carry them to stardom. It stiffed completely: No. 54 in the UK, gone in a fortnight, another flop for a duo whose label was already losing patience. Annie Lennox and Dave Stewart had watched their debut album In the Garden sell almost nothing, and now their supposed breakthrough single had landed with a thud. In the normal course of pop history, that would have been the end of the story — one more interesting failure filed away.

But “Love Is a Stranger” refused to die, because it was secretly the best thing they had ever made. Lennox had written the lyric around a deliberate collision: “I wanted to put opposites together, because love and hate are so close to each other.” The song veers from a sinister, almost clinical description of love’s destructive power to a broken, obsessive refrain — “and I want you, so it’s an obsession.” It was the first Eurythmics single built to let her voice dominate rather than decorate: Lennox told Sounds magazine they mixed it so that “everything in it would be very clear… nothing is hidden in a big mush of sound.” Stewart constructed the track from eighth notes played on a Roland synthesiser over a drum-machine pattern with a repeating sixteenth-note hi-hat figure, accenting passages with an Omnichord for something like an electronic harp. Cold, precise, and gleaming — the sound of a duo discovering exactly who they were.

Then came the video, and the video changed everything except the chart position. Directed by Mike Brady, it cast Stewart as a chauffeur and Lennox as a high-class prostitute, all shadows and suggestion — until the moment she removes a curly blonde wig to reveal short red hair underneath. In Britain it was provocative; in America it was a scandal. MTV imposed a blackout on the clip, and the channel’s producers telexed RCA Records demanding a copy of Lennox’s birth certificate, having convinced themselves she was a transvestite. Think about that for a moment: a major American television network, faced with a woman whose hair was too short and whose stare was too direct, concluded she could not possibly be a woman. Lennox had stumbled, almost accidentally, into one of the defining images of the decade — the androgynous pop star as provocation — and the establishment’s flustered response only made the image more powerful.

Five months later, “Sweet Dreams” exploded, and RCA did something almost unheard of: they re-released the flop. Given a second chance with the full force of the duo’s new fame behind it, “Love Is a Stranger” sailed to No. 6 in the UK — their second Top 10 hit — and in America, where it followed “Sweet Dreams” as the second single, it entered the Billboard Hot 100 at No. 81 in September 1983 and climbed to No. 23 that November. A song does not get many second acts in pop. This one earned its encore the hard way: by being too good, and too strange, to stay buried.

The song got a third life, too. In 1991, when Eurythmics assembled their first Greatest Hits, “Love Is a Stranger” was reissued once more — a victory lap for a song that had already died twice and come back twice. By then its reputation had fully inverted: the flop was now a fan favorite, the weird single was now a classic, the song RCA hadn’t believed in was Exhibit A in the duo’s legend. Reputation in pop is usually a lagging indicator; here it was a resurrection engine. Each reissue found a new audience that heard what the first one missed — that this severe, gleaming record was Eurythmics’ true founding document, the moment the duo’s identity snapped into focus.

Its placement as the opening track of the Sweet Dreams album was no accident. Albums in 1983 were sequenced as arguments, and leading with your strangest, coldest song was a statement: before the hits, here is who we are. The sequencing tells the story the charts couldn’t — that Eurythmics understood themselves long before the public did. “Love Is a Stranger” is the thesis; “Sweet Dreams” is the proof. And the thesis is bleak: love as a stranger, desire as obsession, the human heart as a crime scene. That a song this severe became a Top 10 hit — twice — says as much about the audience’s hidden appetites as it does about the duo’s nerve.

Listen closely

Start with the production, because the production is the argument. That opening — the dry drum-machine tick, the pulsing Roland eighth notes — establishes a world of total control, and then Lennox’s voice enters like a crack in the ice. Listen to how she phrases “love is a stranger in an open car”: the words are clipped, almost spoken, each syllable placed with surgical precision. There is no warmth here, no invitation. This is love described by someone conducting an autopsy on it. The genius of the arrangement is that nothing ever gets in her way — no wall of synths, no reverb wash. Every element sits in its own clean space, exactly as Lennox demanded in that Sounds interview. You can hear the money they didn’t have in every choice: this is maximal impact from minimal means.

Then listen to the chorus, or rather the anti-chorus. Most pop songs build to a release; “Love Is a Stranger” builds to a tightening. “And I want you” — the melody climbs, the synths press in — “so it’s an obsession.” The word “obsession” lands like a verdict. Lennox sings it not as a confession but as a diagnosis, and that is what makes the song so unsettling: she is simultaneously the obsessive and the observer of the obsession. Few singers could hold both positions at once without the performance splitting apart. Lennox does it by keeping her tone almost flat, letting the lyric’s violence do the work that a lesser singer would try to act out.

Listen next for the Omnichord passages — those shimmering, harp-like accents that float over the verses. In 1982, the Omnichord was a novelty gadget, a consumer electronic autoharp; Stewart’s decision to feature it so prominently was the kind of left-field production choice that would become his signature. It gives the track its strange, glassy beauty, the one element of tenderness in an otherwise severe landscape. Without it, the song might be merely cold. With it, the coldness has a texture — you can feel the chill rather than just observe it. That is the difference between a good synth-pop record and a great one, and “Love Is a Stranger” is firmly the latter.

Finally, listen to it as the opening track of the Sweet Dreams album, which is where it truly belongs. Albums in 1983 were sequenced like arguments, and placing this severe, strange song first was a statement of intent: before the hits, before the fame, here is who we actually are. Everything Eurythmics would become — the precision, the provocation, the voice that could cut glass — is already present in these four minutes. The charts took five months to catch up. The song was never in any doubt.

Listen to the backing vocals, because they’re doing something unusual. Lennox harmonizes with herself throughout, but the harmonies don’t sweeten — they sharpen. Where a conventional arrangement would use backing vocals to soften the lead, here they double down on the severity, creating a hall-of-mirrors effect: Lennox accusing, Lennox echoing, Lennox confirming. It’s the sound of a mind arguing with itself, and it makes the “obsession” lyric literal. The obsession isn’t just described; it’s enacted, in stereo.

And listen to how it ends — or rather, how it refuses to end cleanly. There’s no grand finale, no cathartic release. The pulse that drove the whole song simply continues, then stops, leaving the obsession unresolved. It’s the perfect conclusion for a song about a feeling that doesn’t resolve. Most pop songs promise that love conquers or heals or at least explains itself. “Love Is a Stranger” promises nothing. The stranger remains a stranger. The obsession remains an obsession. The song just stops, the way a thought stops when you force yourself to think about something else. You’ll be thinking about it again in an hour.