"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?'."

Written by Björk, Nellee Hooper & Marius De Vries. Produced by Nellee Hooper and Björk. Released in February 1996 as the fourth single from Björk's second album, 'Post'. In June 2002 bjork.com organised a webvote, in order to compile the tracklist for the current 'Greatest Hits' cd, and 'Hyperballad' was voted as the most popular track. The video is directed by Michel Gondry, born in Versailles France. 'Hyperballad' was his fourth videoclip for Björk since their first project 'Human Behaviour' back in 1993. Resulting in a imaginary clip which is almost impossible to interpret the first time you see it. "Will my eyes be closed or open?".

→ Nellee Hooper profile at allmusic.com
→ Marius De Vries profile at allmusic.com

QUOTE

I guess that song is about when you're in a relationship and it's going really well and you're really happy and maybe you have given up parts of yourself. To fall in love and be in a relationship for a long time is like giving a lot of parts of you away because the relationship becomes more important than you as individuals. It's a bit of a tricky balance. I think everyone in a relationship needs to know not to forget themselves...

Obviously, it's imaginary and didn't actually happen: she wakes up before him and sneaks out and throws stuff off a cliff so she can climb back into bed and go 'Good morning, honey'. There's maybe a side of you that you can't fit into a relationship.

REVIEW

“Imagine what my body would sound like / Slamming against those rocks / And when it lands / will my eyes / be closed or open?” In trying to write a synopsis for “Hyperballad,” I found it almost impossible to interpret. Is this Björk’s dead body on the ground beneath the cliffs, with her soul singing above it? Is she a part of the landscape; her nose a part of the mountains? How were these images transferred through the camera lens? Is the person really Björk or mere sculpture? What the heck is the scale on this puppy? Back to my senses for a bit, I see some sense. The bluish, floaty imagery was projected onto glass set above the model. Right? The LED set was just combined with the model set in post. Right? Well, whatever, nevermind.  Due partially to my personal puzzlement in understanding this video and the construction of its imagery, I’ve concluded that “Hyperballad” is, if nothing else, one of the most avant-garde pieces of music video in the late 20th century. At one glance, the composites completely coalesce with the elements of the song. Yet the imagery is so transcendent of any other pop promo. Upside, inside out.

QUOTE

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 , 'Björk, 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?'.

QUOTE

"I was in Japan and she called me from a studio in Bahamas", recalls Eumir. They met couple of days later in London and the results can be heard in tracks Hyper-Ballad, You've Been Flirting Again and Isobel.

Björk: I attempted to make string arrangements, with a lot of help from Eumir. He's been like a big daddy, letting me experiment with notes but still being there for me when I need him, and sometimes just completely doing it for me.

"She has developed a style and a music that I've never heard anything like in my life," says Deodato, who is responsible for some of those string arrangements. "When I heard her material, I freaked out, and I said, 'What are you doing? This is crazy, this is so difficult, to propose this kind of style to the people.' But she does, and she's successful at it. There's the liberty she takes with melodies and with harmony that sometimes apparently leaves clashes that are not really clashes, they're concepts. It's an acoustic principle, but she instinctively goes into that vein, and she blends all these things with a beautiful voice."

Bjork has many enthusiasms, and she pursues them, well, enthusiastically. She is standing slightly pigeon-toed in the engineer's booth of Angel studios, in Islington, England, regarding the space in which she is shortly to record a new mix of "Isobel." The hem of her long black slip dress is taped up where it had ripped when she stepped on it in her enthusiasm. On the other side of the glass, Deodato is rehearsing a 16-piece string section, counting bars and looking very Dolce Vita. "He's a legend, Eumir," she says. True, but it is typical of Bjork that she tracked him down because of his work on a little-known song called "Travessia," by Milton Nascimento.

"You'll listen to it and go, 'OK,'" Bjork says of Nascimento's song. "Then after one year, it's your best friend; after two years, you can't go a day without hearing it."