Teardrop

It started in April 1997 as a harpsichord figure Neil Davidge was playing before the others arrived, which Vowles had him record into the computer, under the working title No Don't. Vowles found beats for it and a simple piano part went on top. Vowles wanted a soul singer, but Del Naja and Marshall wanted Elizabeth Fraser, and the band left her to sketch out a melody and lyrics. According to Davidge, Vowles then sent the demo to Madonna's manager without telling the others, and the reply was enthusiastic. Davidge built a new version the same day, keeping the harpsichord and Fraser's vocal under fresh piano and beats, and he also rewrote the piano with the keyboardist Dave Jenkins. The harpsichord came from a Kurzweil keyboard, the piano was fed through a Leslie cabinet, and a Mellotron choir sound and a Moog bass sit underneath. Spike Stent mixed it at Olympic Studios.

Fraser's lyric adapts phrases from Gaston Bachelard's On Poetic Imagination and Reverie. In 2009 she told The Guardian she had been thinking about her former partner Jeff Buckley, who had disappeared and was later found drowned, and that the song felt to her as if it were about him. Del Naja called it a moment of light relief on the album, and a simple track to make.

Single and video

Released on 27 April 1998 as the second single from Mezzanine, it reached ten in the UK, their only top ten hit there, and number one in Iceland. Walter Stern's video shows a latex foetus singing in the womb. Del Naja said the idea was Stern's, that Fraser was pregnant at the time and was asked to approve it, and that they meant it as a celebration of life. It won the MTV Europe Music Award for Best Video. The song became the opening theme of House, while the band turned down its use in American Beauty.

Live and covers

First played at the Melkweg in Amsterdam on 8 April 1998, it has been performed by the band nearly 450 times. Fraser sang it at their 2024 comeback show in Gothenburg, and it closed the xLive set in Melbourne in August 2026. It is by far their most covered song: José González made it part of his set, and versions by Newton Faulkner, Simple Minds, VOCES8, AURORA and Hayley Williams followed. The two uploads in the hypersongs web are the album version, audio only, and Walter Stern's video in the shorter single edit.