Songoftheday 3/9/17 - Lay a whisper on my pillow, leave the winter on the ground...

"It Must Have Been Love" - Roxette
from the album Pretty Woman (Original Soundtrack) (1990)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: #1 (two weeks)
Weeks in the Top-40: 17

Today's song of the day comes from the Swedish pop duo Roxette, who landed in America with a huge splash, scoring four top-20 pop hits from their breakthrough second album Look Sharp!, with "Dressed For Success", "Dangerous", and a pair of #1 singles in "The Look" and "Listen To Your Heart". For their next release, Per Gessle and Marie Fredrikssen reworked one of their early pre-U.S. fame songs for the movie Pretty Woman.

"It Must Have Been Love" was originally written by Gessle and released in 1987 as a stand-alone seasonal single (hence the subtitle "Christmas For The Brokenhearted"). The song climbed to #4 in their homeland, but wasn't released anywhere else at that time...

Instead of contributing a new song for the Pretty Woman movie, Roxette changed the jangly holiday-style production and a few of the lines referencing Christmas, added some background vocals, and voila, a charmer of a regretful break-up song for that turn in the film plot. It was released as the second single from the soundtrack after Natalie Cole's "Wild Women Do"...

"It Must Have Been Love" became Roxette's third #1 pop hit in the U.S. in June of 1990. The song also spent a week atop Billboard's Adult Contemporary (or "easy listening") radio chart. Internationally, the single topped the charts in Canada, Australia, Spain, Norway, Poland, and Switzerland, and reached the top ten in the Netherlands (#2), New Zealand (#2), the UK (#3), Austria (#3), Belgium (#3), Germany (#4), Ireland (#5), Finland (#7), and their native Sweden (#6). In the British Isles the single returned to the top ten three years later.

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Here's Roxette performing on the Arsenio Hall show to promote the single...