Eurythmics / Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This) [Deluxe Edition] / 1983
Jennifer
hypnotic, eerie, mournful
A minimal, incantatory sketch of a woman rendered almost entirely through color, repeated like a chant until a single image of submersion breaks the surface. The song works less as narrative than as a mood-object: a portrait that dissolves the more it's described.
absence obsession dissolution of identity memory as image drowning/submersion
Who's speaking
An unnamed speaker addresses Jennifer directly, second-person, as though calling to someone who cannot answer; the tone suggests longing shading into elegy, and the speaker's fixation on surface detail hints at unreliability or dissociation.
What happens
There isn't a plot so much as a loop: the speaker catalogs Jennifer's appearance, asks where she is, and the question goes unanswered each time. The interruption naming water beneath things reframes the whole address as possibly posthumous or hallucinatory, after which the same litany resumes, now colored by that suggestion.
How it's built
The song is built almost entirely on repetition rather than development -- the same four-line description recurs three times with only minor variation, bracketing a short, stark middle section that consists of a single repeated phrase. This near-static structure mimics obsessive recollection: the mind returning to the same fixed images because nothing new is available.
Section by section
Opening verse
“Jennifer with your orange hair”
The song opens by fixing Jennifer entirely through unusual color choices rather than ordinary description, immediately signaling that this is memory or fantasy rather than realistic portraiture -- the colors feel chosen for their strangeness and vividness, not their plausibility.
Repeated verse
The near-identical repetition of the description suggests the speaker isn't adding information so much as replaying a fixed mental image, unable or unwilling to move past it. The static nature of the verse enacts the stasis of grief or fixation.
Middle interlude
“Underneath the water”
This brief, isolated phrase functions as the song's turn. Its bareness and repetition make it feel less like a lyric than an intrusive thought, introducing the possibility that Jennifer is dead or submerged -- literally or metaphorically -- and recasting the earlier questions as calls into absence rather than simple curiosity.
Final verse
The return to the opening description after the water interlude doesn't resolve anything; it simply resumes the loop, now haunted by the intervening image. The repeated closing question is left hanging, denying the listener any closure and reinforcing the song's overall sense of suspended, unanswered longing.
Craft
- anaphora
- The repeated naming and address to Jennifer at the start of nearly every line creates a ritualistic, chant-like quality, as though the speaker is trying to conjure her into presence through repetition alone.
- synecdoche via color
- Jennifer is never characterized by action, personality, or speech -- only by hair, eyes, and dress color. This reduces her to a visual afterimage, suggesting she exists for the speaker only as a remembered surface.
- ambiguous refrain
- The recurring question about her location functions both as literal inquiry and as a rhetorical, unanswerable cry, its repetition draining it of informational content and turning it into pure yearning.
- stark imagistic interruption
- The brief middle section breaks the descriptive pattern with a single repeated phrase about being underneath water, functioning almost like a musical bridge that reveals the emotional or narrative undercurrent beneath the otherwise decorative verses.
Reading it
The most persuasive reading treats the song as an elegy disguised as a description: the speaker fixates on visual details of someone who is gone, possibly drowned, and the repetition mimics the compulsive replay of memory when the person addressed cannot respond. An alternative reading takes the water image less literally, as a metaphor for Jennifer being submerged in some other sense -- lost to depression, distance, or a private world the speaker cannot reach -- with the song's power coming from its refusal to specify which.
Context
This track appears on the deluxe edition of Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This), Eurythmics' breakthrough 1983 album, alongside more famous synth-pop material. Its stripped, chant-like construction is atypical even for that era of minimalist synth-based songwriting, and I don't have reliable information on its specific compositional origin or intended subject, so any biographical reading of who 'Jennifer' might be should be treated as speculative.
Listen for
- how the vocal delivery treats the repeated question -- whether it grows more urgent or more resigned with each pass
- the tonal and textural shift when the water phrase enters, and how starkly it contrasts with the descriptive verses
- whether the instrumentation thins out or darkens under the water section, reinforcing the sense of submersion
- the lack of any resolving chord or lyrical answer at the song's end, leaving the address unfinished
About Eurythmics
Eurythmics were a British new wave duo formed in 1980, consisting of the Scottish vocalist Annie Lennox and the English musician and producer Dave Stewart. They had both been previously in the Tourists, a band that broke up in 1980.
1980 - 2005 / United Kingdom
Full biography and catalogue