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It Always Comes as a Surprise

Writers - Tennant/Lowe
First released - 1996
Original album - Bilingual
Producer - Pet Shop Boys, Chris Porter
Subsequent albums - (none)
Other releases - promo single (in Brazil only)

Simply gorgeous. One of the most romantic, melodically beautiful, and evocatively arranged songs the Pet Shop Boys have written, "It Always Comes as a Surprise" was originally conceived as an "ordinary" ballad, virtually in the mode of Phil Collins. But the producer, Chris Porter, suggested that Neil and Chris move the song in a more Latin direction. Performed in a bossa-nova style, it's another of the Bilingual tracks that shows the powerful influence the Boys' South American trip had on them. They included a sample, played backwards, from the Astrud Gilberto/Stan Getz recording "Corcovado (Quiet Nights Of Quiet Stars)," and also brought in a Brazilian musician to play the berimbau, a traditional Brazilian instrument with African roots.

Lyrically, "It Always Comes as a Surprise" expresses the tremendous joy, bordering on disbelief, that anyone (at least anyone with a modicum of humility) feels when seriously contemplating the one they love and how lucky they are to have found each other. Neil has stated that this song, like several others on Bilingual (most notably "Metamorphosis"), is autobiographical.

One thing I especially like about this song is the way in which the Boys subtly yet very skillfully evoke the narrator's sense of almost breathless wonder at the love he's found through more than just the lyrics. They also do so through the structure of the melody itself. Note the pauses of nearly two full measures between the phrases in each verse. For example—

I won't play games [pause]
Or waste your time [pause]
But I won't feel ashamed [pause]
To speak my mind

It may not seem like much, but this is precisely the sort of compositional "special effect" that makes me love the songwriting team of Tennant and Lowe.

It would be remiss of me not to point out that—not surprisingly (pun intended) given the song's roots—this track proved especially popular in Brazil, so much so that it was released uniquely there as a promo single.

Annotations

As already noted, the introduction and conclusion of this song are built around a sample borrowed from the 1963 Stan Getz recording of "Corcovado (Quiet Nights of Quiet Stars)," featuring Astrud Gilberto.
Speaking of Stan Getz, the lovely saxophone solo played by Andy Hamilton during the track's instrumental break was surely inspired by Getz's own trademark "breathy" style of playing the instrument, widely imitated by other saxophonists who followed in his wake, particularly in adult contemporary recordings of the 1960s. (Consider, for instance, the similarly breathy sax solo in Dusty Springfield's 1967 hit recording of "The Look of Love," which was directly inspired by Getz. Only a couple months beforehand, Getz had released his own instrumental version, which happened to be the very first recording of the song.) Getz passed away in 1991, only a few years before "It Always Comes as a Surprise" was written and recorded, and he remained active as a musician into the late 1980s. Had he lived longer, it's not inconceivable that the Boys might have sought him out to record the solo himself.
One of my site visitors has suggested something of an alternate interpretation of this song inspired by its musical structure: its opening and closing based, as mentioned above, on that Getz recording sample. He describes the "main warmth of the song" as being "bookended by a colder, more uncertain mood at the beginning and end." In particular, the ending of the "warm" portion of the song, when Neil sings "dream comes true" one last time in a slower, more drawn-out and slightly dissonant manner, suggests to him that perhaps this song of love is describing an actual dream from which the narrator is, at the end, regretfully waking. This "dream interpretation," of course, makes "It Always Comes as a Surprise" a far, far more bittersweet number than it would be otherwise. I can't really say that I adhere to this interpretation myself, but it's certainly well worth considering. And in light of the aforementioned bookending, which might be viewed as "framing" the dream, it's by no means without merit.

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