It Must Have Been Love
Roxette
How to study this song
The card for “It Must Have Been Love” is built from 42 study entries at A2-: 17 English words, 5 adjectives and 20 verb forms. Start with the glossary: whisper, pillow and winter come up again and again, so they are the ones to know first. This one leans on its verbs: 20 distinct forms against 5 adjectives, so conjugation is where the effort goes. At this level the goal is recognition: hear a word, place it, keep going.
The words of this song, in several languages
Every word below is taken from this song and translated by us. Nothing here is the lyric itself — these are the individual words you need in order to follow it.
Vocabulary
| EN | ES | IT | FR | PT | NL | DE |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| whisper | susurro | sussurro | murmure | sussurro | fluistering | Flüstern |
| pillow | almohada | cuscino | oreiller | almofada | kussen | Kissen |
| winter | invierno | inverno | hiver | inverno | winter | Winter |
| ground | suelo | terra, suolo | sol | chão |
What this song teaches you
Level · A2-
- Vocabulary words
- 17
- Adjectives
- 5
- Word combos
- 6
- Expressions
- 10
- Verb forms
- 20
- Quiz questions
- 35
More English songs at this level
Background
About the song
«It Must Have Been Love» is the ballad that turned Roxette, the Swedish duo formed by Per Gessle and Marie Fredriksson, into a household name far beyond Europe. Gessle wrote it and Fredriksson sang it, and the combination of his simple, memorable melody and her powerful, slightly husky voice is the reason the song still sounds so direct more than three decades later. The version most people know is the one released in March 1990 on the soundtrack of «Pretty Woman», the romantic comedy starring Julia Roberts and Richard Gere.
The song, however, is older than the film. Roxette first released it in Sweden on 2 December 1987 under a longer title, «It Must Have Been Love (Christmas for the Broken Hearted)». It was a seasonal single about a lonely Christmas after a break-up, and it reached number four on the Swedish chart, but it was never released anywhere else. At that point Roxette were still a local act; their international breakthrough came only in 1989, when «The Look» reached number one in the United States.
That success is what opened the door to Hollywood. Touchstone Pictures asked the band for a song for the soundtrack of «Pretty Woman», and instead of writing something new, Gessle went back to the Christmas ballad. He removed the references to the holiday so that the story would fit a film set in Los Angeles, turning the Christmas day of the original into an ordinary hard winter day, and the new mix was trimmed by about twenty-four seconds at the end. The producer, as on all of Roxette’s big records of the period, was Clarence Öfwerman.
The lyric describes the morning after a relationship has ended. The singer wakes up alone, notices the silence in the room and slowly admits that what she had was real and that it is gone. The key phrase of the title is a grammatical one: English uses «must have been» to make a confident guess about the past, so the whole song sounds like someone looking back and reaching a painful conclusion rather than simply describing a feeling. In the film, the ballad plays when the relationship between the two main characters seems to be over, and that scene fixed the song in the memory of millions of viewers.