Home
Depeche Mode
How to study this song
“Home” carries 26 English words, 13 adjectives and 23 verb forms — 62 study entries in all, graded C1-. The glossary is the place to begin — song, side and town are the song’s keywords. It is unusually descriptive — 13 adjectives alongside 26 everyday words — so expect colour rather than plot. At this level the words on their own are not the problem — it is the way they are put together that takes the work.
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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| song | canción | canzone | chanson | canção | lied | Lied |
| side | lado | lato | côté | lado | kant | Seite |
| town | ciudad, pueblo | città | ville | cidade | stad | Stadt, Dorf |
| ground | suelo | terra, suolo | sol | chão |
What this song teaches you
Level · C1-
- Vocabulary words
- 26
- Adjectives
- 13
- Word combos
- 10
- Expressions
- 10
- Verb forms
- 23
- Quiz questions
- 35
More English songs at this level
Background
About the song
«Home» is the third single from «Ultra», the ninth Depeche Mode studio album, and it is one of the songs in their catalogue that Martin Gore sings himself rather than handing to Dave Gahan. That detail matters to the story of the record. «Ultra» was made in 1996 and early 1997, in the most difficult stretch the band ever went through: Alan Wilder had left in 1995, and Gahan was fighting a heroin addiction that nearly killed him in the spring of 1996. For a while nobody was sure the group would survive at all, and the sessions were planned as a test to see whether a new album was even possible.
The producer was Tim Simenon, known for his work as Bomb the Bass, who gave the album a darker, more textured electronic sound than the stadium rock of the early nineties. «Home» sits slightly apart from that sound. It opens with a hymn-like string arrangement and a slow, swaying rhythm, and it has the feel of a ballad that has been carried a long way before it arrives. Gore wrote it as a song of thanks, and the verses do something unusual for a thank-you song: they begin with images of confinement and weight — a cage, a trap, a cross, a body pressed to the ground — before the chorus turns towards gratitude and belonging.
That structure is what makes the lyric useful for a learner. The verses are built almost entirely from superlative adjectives, each one describing something at its extreme, and the chorus answers them with simple, warm verbs of bringing, showing and singing. Listeners have read the song as being about faith, about love, about recovery or about the band itself finding its way back after nearly breaking up, and Gore has generally preferred to leave the meaning open. What is clear is the movement from isolation to the feeling of having found the right place, which is exactly what the title promises.
Did you know?
The superlatives in the verses all follow the same spelling rule: an adjective ending in a consonant plus y changes the y to i before adding -est. Lonely, empty, heavy, deadly and sickly all do it, which makes the song an unusually tidy lesson in one corner of English spelling.
In concert «Home» became one of the moments audiences wait for. Crowds have long kept singing its wordless closing melody after the band stops playing, sometimes for minutes, and Gore has often stood at the front of the stage and let them carry it. The habit was captured on several of the band’s live films.