Matt Knight’s “4:20 HIT of the Day” – 8/16/22
Every weekday, I’m going to drop a song that I like to call the 4:20 HIT of the Day. What does this mean? Simply, it’s a song that I think will give you some good vibes, ‘spark up’ nostalgia or just remind you about a tune that you might love but just haven’t heard in a while.
Today’s HIT comes from the soundtrack of ‘Romeo + Juliet’ with Leonardo DiCaprio & Claire Danes from 1996. Swedish rock band The Cardigans released “Lovefool” in their home country in mid-1996, then in August of that year it was serviced to United States radio stations. Later that year, it was included on the movie soundtrack thrusting the song to #2 on the Billboard Hot 100 Airplay chart.
Singer Nina Persson wrote the lyrics to the song at an airport while waiting for a plane. She later said that the song is “quite a sad love song; the meaning of it is quite pathetic, really.” She also added that “the biggest hits are the ones that are the easiest to write.”
She said that, at the time, the song “was slower and more of a bossa nova”. Persson noted that the band knew the potential commercial appeal of the song, saying, “We definitely were aware that it was a single and a catchy song when we wrote it, but the direction it took is not something we could have predicted. It wasn’t necessarily our character; it felt like a bit of a freak on the record — which, objectively, it still is. But then when we were recording, by chance, our drummer started to play that kind of disco beat, and there was no way to get away from it after that.”