Songfacts®:

• In this song, Eurythmics frontwoman Annie Lennox plays the role of a woman going insane. The lyric is disjointed, reflecting her state of mind. She keeps repeating the same phrase: "I love to listen to Beethoven."
  
  In a Songfacts interview with her bandmate Dave Stewart, he explained: "It was really about somebody losing their mind, a woman under the influence or that kind of feeling, which Annie grasped straightaway."
• "Beethoven (I Love to Listen To)" doesn't follow the conventions of a pop song. Annie Lennox' vocal is chopped up, and her verses are spoken, with her lines often echoing back at her. Eurythmics were one of the more musically daring acts of the '80s, and when Dave Stewart found a new instrument, like a drum machine or synthesizer, he often pushed it to its limits.
  
  This song he built on a Synclavier, one of the first digital synthesizer/samplers, which allowed him to take a line like "I love to" and repeat it at different points throughout the track. He got the Synclavier from Jack Nitzsche, a keyboard player known for hacking his instruments to create unique sounds - Nitzsche appears on many Rolling Stones tracks from the '60s.
  
  Dave Stewart told Songfacts the story:
  
  "This was a big lump of a thing, the height of the ceiling. You could actually have words and sounds sampled and play them, but it was a very laborious effort.
  
  The guy that played the drums in Eurythmics is from Sweden, Olle Romo, and he is very technical, kind of genius. We got the Synclavier to this chateau in France. We always liked to record in different places but this chateau for three months was about the same price as a recording studio for a month, but it was huge, with 24 bedrooms, and it was miles outside of Paris and Normandy. The smoking room was the called the fumoir, and that was the only little room where we could set up the gear and not have big echoing sounds. So I made that song up out of words, moving them about."
• Why is the woman in this song obsessed with the music of Beethoven? That's because when Dave Stewart was putting it together on the Synclavier, he started playing what sounded like the famous bit from Beethoven's "5th Symphony" - the part that goes Duh-duh-duh... DUH. With Beethoven on his mind, he made the famous composer part of the lyric.
• The song is best understood in context with its music video, which is how Eurythmics delivered it to their label. It opens with a shot of Annie Lennox knitting on the couch in a fairly typical apartment. Clearly agitated, she's talking to herself, saying things you wouldn't expect to hear from a happy homemaker:
  
  I was dreaming like a Texan girl...
  A girl who thinks she should have something extreme
  
  When the music kicks in, she goes into action, manically cleaning and arranging while also hallucinating - a young girl appears that perhaps represents her repressed wild side. By the end of the video, Lennox has gussied up for a night out and leaves the apartment, apparently headed for the club.
  
  By this time, Lennox was a video star, known for her strikingly different looks often within the same video. Quite shy in real life, she is a very convincing actress, so Eurythmics videos played to this talent instead of having her just lip-sync the songs.
• The "Beethoven" video was the first one directed by Sophie Muller, who became one of the most celebrated directors in the form. At a time when most music videos were made by men, she proved particularly adept at filming women and developed long-lasting relationships with the likes of Garbage, Gwen Stefani, and Beyoncé. Eurythmics kept her busy: she went on to direct many more of their videos, including "You Have Placed a Chill In My Heart" and "Don't Ask Me Why." When Lennox went solo, Muller became her go-to director. Some of their work together includes groundbreaking videos for "Walking On Broken Glass" and "Why."
• In the UK, this was the first single from Eurythmics' sixth album, Savage. No record company honcho would ever pick it as the lead single, but they didn't have a choice - by this time Eurythmics had control of what songs were issued as singles, and they chose "Beethoven."
  
  "Imagine, I delivered this video as the first single to the record label," Dave Stewart told Songfacts. "They're all sitting in a room, I put it on, and there's Annie going, 'I was dreaming like a Texas girl...'
  
  And they're like, 'What the hell is this? She's got a wig on and knitting.'
  
  Then it goes into the song and there's no song, just this weird Synclavier sound and then every now and then when she's flipping out in the kitchen, or smashing the shelves, it goes, 'I love to listen to... Beethoven.'"
  
  In America, the first single from the album was "I Need a Man."