For 35 years, we’ve been labouring under the misapprehension that Roxette’s It Must Have Been Love is the archetypal power ballad, says the man who wrote it.
Discussing the making of the song with The Guardian, Per Gessle - one half of Roxette alongside the late Marie Fredriksson - says: “People think it’s a power ballad, but it isn’t. The production is sparse. It doesn’t need power chords or big orchestrations: all the power is in Marie’s voice.”
Does that mean that it isn’t a power ballad, though? Wikipedia doesn’t seem to think so, and although the arrangement isn’t especially complex, you might argue that Fredriksson’s soaring vocal is precisely what takes the song into power ballad territory.
Whatever you want to call it, It Must Have Been Love has certainly stood the test of time, not least because it was prominently featured in Garry Marshall’s enduringly popular 1990 rom-com, Pretty Woman.
It wasn’t actually written for the movie, though: It Must Have Been Love was originally released in Sweden, Roxette’s homeland, in December 1987, as a quasi-Christmas song. It was tinselled up at the request of EMI Germany, the band’s label at the time, which was struggling to get them any radio play.
“I’d already started it as a love song: ‘It must have been love, but it’s over now,’” says Gessle. “But after the German label’s request, I added in a solitary reference to Christmas in the second verse.”
It Must Have Been Love (Christmas for the Broken Hearted) - as the song was originally known - hit number 4 in Sweden, but wasn’t released internationally. And that might have been that had the Pretty Woman call not come in.
However, with the reference to ‘Christmas Day’ changed to ‘a winter’s day’ in the second pre-chorus, a new guitar intro added and a big gated reverb slapped on the snare, the Julia Roberts and Richard Gere movie turned It Must Have Been Love into one of the biggest songs of 1990, and it now has close to a billion streams.
There’s a sadness to that success, though, in the fact that Marie Fredriksson is no longer around to enjoy it - she died in 2019 after battling cancer for 17 years.
Gessle still has fond memories of the song, though: he says that Roxette’s 2009 reformation was triggered by Fredriksson making a surprise appearance to sing it at one of his solo shows, having been out of the spotlight for eight years.
“I’ve never in my life seen so many people crying,” remembers Gessle of that evening. “Marie got so much energy from that that she wanted to make another album and go on tour, which we did. I think that gave her a couple more years.”
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