Songfacts®:

• "Killing Me Softly With His Song" was a #1 hit for Roberta Flack in 1973. In 1996, the Fugees gave it a modern makeover, adding hip-hop beats and vocal interjections to flavor it up and shortening the title to "Killing Me Softly." The 1973 version (not the original - the song was first released by a singer named Lori Lieberman in 1972) is very slow, driven by Flack's captivating vocal that tells a story about seeing a singer perform and feeling like he's singing directly to her, reaching into her soul. The Fugees made it suitable for the shorter attention spans of the '90s while retaining the essence of the song. This was made possible by the female member of the group, Lauryn Hill, who could sing with the necessary conviction and also rap in a variety of flows.
• The Fugees are the trio of Lauryn Hill along with the rapper/producers Pras and Wyclef Jean. Hill's mother was a big Roberta Flack fan, so Lauryn knew the song very well. One day she and Pras were in a car when it came on the radio, and they both agreed they should cover the song, in part to introduce it to a new generation.
  
  "One of our goals is to re-unite the youths with musicality," Hill said. "It's about soul."
• Parts of the song, including the Middle Eastern-sounding strings and subsequent drum beat, were sampled from "Bonita Applebum," a 1990 track by A Tribe Called Quest. The strings originate from a 1967 song called "Memory Band" by the group Rotary Connection; the drums come from "Fool Yourself," a 1973 song by Little Feat. So what Fugees used were samples of samples.
• Fugees wanted to change the title to "Killing Him Softly" and make it a song about drug abuse, but any lyric changes to the original song require permission from that song's writers, and the guys who wrote "Killing Me Softly With His Song" - Charles Fox and Norman Gimbel - refused. This forced the Fugees to stay faithful to the lyrics, but they were free to put their own musical stamp on it.
• The group recorded the song in Wyclef Jean's basement studio, which he called "the Booga Basement."
• "Killing Me Softly With His Song" is the most popular Fugees song. It first appeared on their second album, The Score, released in February 1996 when the group had just a small following. The first single from the album, "Fu-Gee-La," was released at the end of 1995 and did pretty well, charting at #29 in the US that March.
  
  Radio stations started playing "Killing Me Softly With His Song," but the group decided not to release it as a single in America, a shrewd move that forced fans to buy the entire album in order to own the song. By June, the song was all over the airwaves, reaching #2 on Billboard's Airplay chart. The Score went on to sell over 7 million albums, but the group split up a year later. Lauryn Hill released her monumental album The Miseducation Of Lauryn Hill in 1998, but no more albums from either Hill or the Fugees materialized. The Fugees have reunited over the years for various performances.
• This song picked up the Grammy for Best R&B Performance By A Duo Or Group With Vocal, and The Score won for Best Rap Album.
• In America, the song wasn't eligible for the Hot 100 because it wasn't released as a single, but it went to #1 in most European countries and also hit the top spot in Australia.
• The singer-songwriter Colbie Caillat was first inspired to start singing when she heard the Fugees version of "Killing Me Softly" at age 11.
• Wyclef Jean and Lauryn Hill made a rare appearance at the Grammy Awards in 2026, where they performed this song in honor of Roberta Flack, who died the previous year.