Song Of The Day 2/2/2017: Eurythmics – “I Need You”


You Pick The Artist - The Final Picking -- Noelle Teninty Gibson gave me Eurythmics, and I'll be upfront and say I'm just gonna take the contrarian way out of this one. Eurythmics gave us a long streak of hit singles in the '80s that were all, pretty much, consistently good. Then in 1987 they put out Savage, a slightly manic, emotionally enervated account of alienation that failed to crack the Top 40 on the US album charts. It was their first album since their debut In the Garden to not produce at least one Top 40 single. Savage was chilly, sometimes monotone, sometimes sarcastic and defiantly not the feel-good album of the summer. You know where I'm going with this: Savage is my favorite Eurythmics album.

"I Need You" comes near the tail end of Savage and obviously contains no hint of the Eurythmics' primary artistic traits, except for Annie Lennox's voice. It's almost besieged by jadedness, recorded with the fake sounds of a disinterested barroom to achieve the effect that nobody's really listening to Annie singing. Yeah, kind of a cheap trick, and I'm not saying "I Need You" is their best song. But it's certainly their most effective. Thanks Noelle!