Moth To A Flame

Album: Paradise Again (2021)
Charted: 15 27
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Songfacts®:

  • Half a decade after announcing their split, Swedish House Music reunited in 2018 with a surprise closing set at the Ultra Music Festival in Miami, Florida. Three years later, the trio announced their third studio album, Paradise Again. "Moth To A Flame," featuring vocals by The Weeknd, is their third single from the set.
  • "Like a moth to a flame" is a phrase that alludes to the way moths get drawn to bright lights. Shakespeare referenced their irresistible and dangerous attraction to a flame in his 1596 play The Merchant of Venice.

    Thus hath the candle singed the moth

    The Weeknd uses the idiom to describe his relationship with a girl who has a partner. Though her guy is good for her, she cannot resist the lure of the Toronto singer - like a moth to a flame.

    I'll pull you in, I pulled you back to
    What you need initially
    It's just one call away
  • The three Swedish House Mafia members - Axwell, Steve Angello, and Sebastian ingrosso - wrote the slow-burning pop song with The Weeknd. The Swedes also produced the track with Carl Nordström.
  • When Swedish House Mafia were thinking of people they wanted to work with, the first name they wrote down was The Weeknd. "We love his dark side," Ingrosso told the BBC. "his voice, his mindset, everything."

    The three Swedes share a manager with the Toronto artist, so they thought getting him on board would be relatively straightforward. But when they asked their management to arrange for him to join them in the studio, they said it doesn't work like that - The Weeknd needs to sit down and meet first. "He wanted to see our vision, our ideas, to hear the whole album," Ingrosso said. "And so we flew to LA and had two days just hanging out, drinking, having fun - and then we went into the studio. It was a genuine way and that's always the best way, you know?"
  • Swedish House Mafia dropped an extended mix on January 5, 2021 that is geared more towards clubbers and concertgoers. "The idea behind the extended version was to bring out a shape of the song that could fit the festivals and arenas we're visiting in 2022," Axwell told Apple Music. "The original is so close to our hearts that we didn't want to change it too much or take away Abel's energy. We just wanted to give it an extra euphoric feeling."
  • The Weeknd included "Moth To A Flame" as a bonus track on the "Alternate World" edition of Dawn FM.

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