Know Your Tunes - Week of  9/8

It Must've Been Love by Roxette

We haven't featured a Know Your Tunes in a minute and this OUTSTANDING piano version of "It Must've Been Love" by Ulrika A. Rosén inspired a Know Your Tunes! Check this video out along with her other covers!

This song was written by Roxette's instrumentalist, Per Gessle.

Originally called "It Must Have Been Love (Christmas For The Broken Hearted)," The record label suggested the duo record a Christmas tune to try to get some airplay, so Gessle got to work writing a holiday ballad.

It Must Have Been Love" was reworked for the movie Pretty Woman, starring Julia Roberts and Richard Gere. The movie was an enormous hit, and so was the soundtrack. For the Pretty Woman version, Gessle kept most of Marie Fredrikkson's original vocals but cut out the Christmas sounds at the beginning of the song. He also changed the lyric "a hard Christmas day" to "a hard winter's day."

According to Gessle, Pretty Woman director Garry Marshall loved the song so much he re-edited the movie so he could showcase it in a scene without dialogue. Still, Gessle, who had never had a song placed in a film before, was initially disappointed when only about a minute of it was used. He told Billboard he thought, "Everything is going to circle around my song." But there were no complaints when the movie and song became instant hits. "Nobody expected the movie to become such a smash and for us it was, of course, a jackpot," he told Songwriter Universe in 2018.

Gessle was asked how many times Roxette had performed "It Must Have Been Love," to which he replied: "We've done it at every show, so it's been hundreds of times. We don't need to rehearse it, put it that way. When you stand there in front of all the people who love it, it's an amazing feeling."