"It was inspired by a situation I saw a lot of my friends get in to. I really like reading magazines about science, you see, and when people fall in love, they make this kind of drug in their bodies so they become addicted to each other physically.

"Nature makes things so that the drug lasts for three years, so if they're together they're just on a natural high. Nature makes sure that people get three years to sort out if they want to be together for life or not; that three years is a try out time. Then they wake up and it's a 'Whoops, what am I doing here?' kind of thing? Then they are forced to sort out if they love the person, like real love, or if it was just a trick.

"I just read this article and I looked at all my friends since I was a kid, and I saw that it always happened after three years, it's so strange. You think you've never seen people so much in love and then after three years, like precisely, they ring the phone in the middle of the night and it's , 'Bjork, I'm coming over' and they come over and say 'I don't love him, what is it? I don't look forward to coming home anymore. What's wrong?' Then at that point I could actually say, 'Well listen, it's science.'

"They get really hurt of course, it's this David Attenborough dilemma I've got, I really want to be him. Another completely different angle on the same thing is when you fall in love with a person, you think that might be the last time, that maybe you will never ever fall in love again, so it becomes a very precious thing to you. So you start showing the person you're in love with you're best side only and you keep all your bad parts in the bag behind your back.

"For some terrible reason, for which I'm actually a bit pissed off with, is when you fall in love with a person you start to separate into two sides and you're only sweet with them.

"So basically, 'Hyper-ballad' is about having this kind of bag going on and three years have passed and you're not high anymore. You have to make an effort consciously and nature's not helping you anymore. So you wake up early in the morning and you sneak outside and you do something horrible and destructive, break whatever you can find, watch a horrible film, read a bit of William Burroughs, something really gross and come home and be like, 'Hi honey, how are you?'"


Bjork, on writing Hyperballad
Feedback, February 1996