This rather intense song is about a lonely, alienated girl who lets no one get close to her because of the pain she has endured in the past. She lives in a fantasy world to protect her heart.
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Suggestion credit:
Mike - Santa Barbara, CA
This was the second single released from the Australian pop duo's self-titled debut album, following the hit "
I Want You." The song was only a minor success, barely making the Top 40 in the US, but after the subsequent single, "Truly Madly Deeply," became a chart-topping smash, the record label decided to take another shot at "To The Moon And Back." A shorter edit was released and peaked at #27 in the US and #3 in the UK (where the original version had previously stalled at #55).
Darren Hayes and Daniel Jones, the duo behind Savage Garden, wrote all of their own music, with vocalist Hayes writing the lyrics and Jones composing the music. For "To The Moon In Back," Hayes was inspired by the 1982 sci-fi classic Blade Runner, starring Harrison Ford as a futuristic law-enforcement veteran who is tasked to hunt down human-like robots. The singer told Apple Music how the tune came together: "This has one of the most complete instrumentals that Daniel ever wrote. It's such a beautiful, haunting piece of music. I was a big science fiction fan - I loved Blade Runner. I wrote it from that point of view, or the idea of what it means to be human. That idea of yearning to express your emotions and your feelings and for that to be legitimized. There was also someone in my life whose persona was very standoffish and who pushed everyone who loved her away. But I could see underneath that hard shell, there was so much pain and all that stuff that I identified with - mum never loved her much, daddy never kept in touch, these are things actually bothering this person."
Savage Garden was a huge hit in the US, where it sold 7 million copies. It peaked at #3 on the albums chart in April 1998, behind Celine Dion's Let's Talk About Love at #2 and the Titanic soundtrack at #1.
The album was produced by Australian record producer Charles Fisher, who also helmed Air Supply's Lost In Love (1980) and Moving Pictures' Days Of Innocence (1982) and Matinee (1983). His work with Savage Garden earned him the award for Producer of the Year at the 1997 ARIA Awards, where "To The Moon And Back" was named Song of the Year and Best Pop Release. The duo also scooped trophies for Album of the Year, Single of the Year (for "Truly Madly Deeply"), and Best Group.
Three music videos were made. The Australian version, directed by Catherine Caines and Chris Bentley, is a black-and-white video features Hayes and Jones performing on a spacecraft, while a troubled young woman stalks the mean streets of a futuristic world.
The second version, directed by Nigel Dick for the original international release, shows the duo recording the song in a Malibu apartment while a lonely woman listens from another room.
The third version, directed by Adolfo Doring for the second international release, was filmed in New York and follows a teenage girl walking alone through the moonlit city to meet a group of friends.
Savage Garden wanted to set themselves apart in the pop realm of the late '90s, which was dominated by the likes of the Backstreet Boys and Britney Spears. After the release of their hit pop confection "I Want You," they strategically chose a more sophisticated track for their follow-up single. Jones recalled in a track-by-track commentary for the 2015 compilation The Singles: "'To The Moon And Back' had a lot more substance and was a lot more of a deeper sort of song and beautifully, lyrically, creatively put together from Darren's point of view. I wanted people to understand that yes this is a pop band, but it was an intellectual pop band... yes we have pop melodies, yes, we have pop progressions but we're saying something lyrically here that's a little bit more clever than 'oh I want you.'"
The band wasn't 100 percent confident in the outro, a dramatic swell of strings provided by the Sydney Symphony Orchestra. Hayes recalled: "I was a huge Bjork fan and I always love songs that kinda came back for a revamp so from a structural part of view, it was a much different song. At the same time, we were worried that it might be too serious, I could never tell if that song was a hit or not." Hayes was gratified when it did become a big hit in the UK and Australia.
The duo brought the song to life in the studio with spacey synths and ethereal sound effects befitting the tale of a woman who wants to escape her Earthly realm - but they nearly killed it in the process. Hayes recalled in an early promo interview: "It was incredibly hard to record because the demo was so…perfect. It was a really simple song and it had out of key singing in the demo had cheap keyboard sounds, but it was so believable. And that's the reason why everyone hooked on that song. And recording 'To The Moon And Back,' we really tried to jazz it up, change it, and make it this and make it that and we almost lost it. I think we only just got 'To The Moon And Back.'"
Jones composed the entire song before Hayes heard any of it. He was sitting in a dumpy Brisbane pub drinking one night and realized he wanted to do something more with his life. When he got home and wrote the song, he knew he had something special. "I remember kinda going, This is my ticket that's going to stop me from having to go back to that pub and drink," he recalled in The Singles commentary. "And it's a strange metaphor for me but that song saved me, as well as when Darren contributed his lyrical story to it. It floored me even more so because it was a very personal subject for him about a friend of his that probably wasn't that dissimilar to me in the sense that they were lost."
Hayes was surprised to learn that Catherine Caines' video treatment played on the song's reference to
Blade Runner. "I'd never even told her, that's how in synch we were," he
told the Aussie news site News.com.au. "Catherine was honestly the first person to totally understand my style and my androgyny. She knew how to photograph me. Our inspirations were big '80s videos, black and white and dystopian society. We both loved the movie
Brazil by Terry Gilliam and that was a huge influence when we did the original shoot. It was a huge production for that budget, with a space ship set built, and a location shoot in tunnels, massive Orwellian posters of us plastered under bridges and a costume department like
Aliens."
Despite how much he loved the video, Hayes was unhappy with fake-looking scenes that featured the duo wearing flight suits as they were suspended from rafters. He also didn't like how his hair covered his face, reflecting the insecurity he had about his looks at the time. He begged the record label for more money to shoot new scenes, and he got it.
"Catherine, myself and Chris wrote more segments that specifically addressed the band look and a totally new performance from me to camera in that chair," he explained. "Namely, they built a new cockpit, and she and I restyled my look with my hair slicked back off my face - the first time I'd ever been photographed like that, and wearing all black. That new footage became the centerpiece of the video, the look became iconic and it led me to eventually cut my hair off so the world could see my face. It’s still one of my favorite videos we ever made."
