Album: Hercules and Love Affair (2008)
Charted: 40
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Songfacts®:

  • Hercules & Love Affair is a musical project of New York producer/DJ Andrew Butler. The band name was inspired by the mythic tale of Hercules' search for his male lover Hylas. Among the collaborators are Antony Hegarty, the frontman of Antony and the Johnsons. Hegarty is best known for his 2005 collection, I Am a Bird Now, which won the Mercury prize for the best album from the United Kingdom or Ireland. He provides the vocals on "Blind."
  • "Blind" was influenced by Yazoo's song "Situation," which was originally the B-side of their 1982 hit "Don't Go," before a re-mixed version by Francois Kevorkian charted in it's own right in 1990 (UK #14). Andew Butler recalled to Mojo magazine February 2008 of how Yazoo's club-pop song was a formative experience when he first heard it as a ten-year-old: "I'd force my parents to hear the cassette tapes I'd made up. I remember my mother once saying, in her straight, American Midwest way, 'I don't think you should be listening to this music, is this a man or a woman singing?' To which I replied (adopts whiny kid's voice), 'Why can't you just appreciate the beauty of the voice?' But I was as excited by the synth hook and the delay Vince Clarke put it all through as I was by Alison Moyet's singing."

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