This song of longing for a lost love was written from the (broken) heart by Dirty Vegas lead singer Steve Smith, who was pining for his ex-girlfriend, a woman named Charlotte. It has a happy ending though: After the song was released they got back together and eventually got married. "Songs always win a girl's heart," Smith said.
Dirty Vegas formed in 2001 when the DJs Paul Harris and Ben Harris (no relation) saw Steve Smith perform and asked him to join them. Paul and Ben had been recording as The Hydrogen Rockers. Smith brought "Days Go By" to the studio the first time they worked together, and it was released as their first single in 2001. Thanks to a hypnotic beat and simple but soul-bearing lyric, the song was huge in clubs all over the world. In America it took a while to land, but in the summer of 2002 it went to #1 on the Dance chart and also made #14 on the Hot 100.
The
first version of "Days Go By" was a high-BPM mix released in Europe as The Hydrogen Rockers. The group later changed their name to Dirty Vegas and released a different mix of the song with a slower tempo and distorted vocals.
The group recorded the song using Pro Tools software, which wasn't all that common in 2001 - digital recording was still very glitchy. This worked out well for them, though, because they didn't need to book expensive studio time, thus allowing them to keep tweaking it and making different mixes.
Dirty Vegas are not from Las Vegas. In fact, they're not even from America. The three founding members are from the London area. They chose the name after a night of gambling; they thought it captured the spirit of their sound: decadent and tacky.
The video is as heart-wrenching as the song. It tells the story of a middle-aged man who breakdances in business attire all day once a year in the same spot he did in his youth in hopes that the woman he let go will come back to him. The video uses text to tell the story. The group show up as observers but the focus is on the breakdancer.
The location for the video is Chronis Famous Sandwich Shop in Los Angeles.
The video was first shown at RESFEST, a traveling show of short films from around the world. It was a huge hit at the festival and gained the attention of MTV, which put it in rotation.
Many of us heard this song for the first time in a 2002
commercial for the Mitsubishi Eclipse that shows a woman dancing wildly in the passenger seat as a man drives around, presumably looking for a club. It became a very popular spot in the US, and gave the song a great deal of exposure. Shortly after the ad appeared, many radio stations started playing the song.
The ad was conceived by a Mitsubishi representative who saw the video and thought it would be the perfect song to attract trend-setting young people, their target market for the car. "They're like, we have this car. We want every 25-year-old to go out and buy our car," Steve Smith told the Boston Globe. "There was a young director, younger than us. We thought, this is the direction to go in."
The Mitsubishi commercial with this song proved so popular that the company commissioned more ads for the Eclipse using the song. The original ad was well known that
Dave Chappelle parodied it, playing the driver who can't abide his passenger's awkward dance moves.
Dirty Vegas hadn't yet finished their self-titled debut album when "Days Go By" became a surprise hit. This was unfortunate because it meant fans of the song had no album to buy. The other songs on the album didn't make much impact, and after their second album in 2004, the band fractured, with Paul and Ben Harris leaving Steve Smith as the only original member. He moved to Boston, continued to record under the Dirty Vegas moniker, and also made music for TV shows and films.
When Steve Smith wrote the song he recorded the demo acoustic, and an acoustic version was included as a bonus track on the album. This version proved quite popular, and is typically
how Smith performs it.
In 2003, "Days Go By" won the Grammy Award for Best Dance Recording.
This song is a great example of lyrical efficiency, with just 38 unique words and the same verse repeated twice:
You are still a whisper on my lips
A feeling at my fingertips
That's pulling at my skin
You leave me when I'm at my worst
A feeling as if I've been cursed
Bitter cold within
It's powerful stuff, and it works really well in a dance track where repetition is key.
The British songwriter Victoria Horn, known as "Lady V," has a credit on this song along with Steve Smith. She's also a co-writer on "Who Do You Love Now?" by by Dannii Minogue and "
I'll Be Your Doctor" by Joe Cocker.
The song has a specific inspiration but a malleable meaning. "It has a universal theme and lyric," Steve Smith
told Steven Housman. "It affects all of us, no matter who one loves. It could be a guy to a guy, a girl to a girl... It's about missing someone."
