For some, the path to success runs smooth and true, with no pesky detours or steep inclines; for others, it’s a long, rocky trail with dead ends and craggy hills, where your health, sanity, and your very last penny are all at stake.

Sometimes you gotta mine a few dark seams to get those sweet dreams.

Annie Lennox was working at a restaurant in London when she met Dave Stewart in 1975. He was already in a band (with one other guy) and she had recently dropped out of the Royal Academy of Music. Love blossomed, and so did the band, who soon added a couple of members, changed their name to The Tourists, and signed with a small, indie record label. Their second album produced two UK Top 10 hits in 1980, including a cover of Dusty Springfield’s “I Only Want To Be With You,” but tensions mounted as Lennox and Stewart felt artistically constrained, as they barely contributed to any of the songwriting and didn’t feel the music was adventurous enough. Also, the band’s third album bombed.

The Tourists broke up. Annie and Dave broke up. Things weren’t looking good.

However, the formerly entwined — now extwined — paramours decided to continue their working relationship as Eurythmics, a duo who controlled their own artistic output, their own destiny. They’d have to wait on the whole controlling their destiny part, though — the bank controlled that since their debut album also bombed and the pair found themselves forced to take out a massive loan to buy a bunch of synthesizers and recording equipment to fill up their tiny home studio situated above a picture-framing factory so they could pursue their dreams. They lived and recorded in the studio for the next half of a year.

During this time, Stewart was hospitalized with a punctured lung and Lennox suffered a nervous breakdown from all the stress and depression. And yet, from all these nightmares, “Sweet Dreams” emerged. Dave was messing around with a synth bassline when Annie walked in and asked, “What the hell is that?” She immediately jumped onto another synth and played an interweaving melody line. They built the song on that foundation, although Stewart had to add a couple of positive lyrics in the end as Lennox’s proved a little too pessimistic.

The record label didn’t want to release “Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This)” as a single due its lack of a chorus but, as had happened so many times before, a radio DJ saved the day and began playing the album track repeatedly until the label had no choice. Released officially as a single in January of 1983, “Sweet Dreams” topped the charts in the US and just missed in the UK, helped not only by the driving beat of the hook-laden synth riffs, but also by a striking video featuring Annie with close-cropped orange hair and wearing a 3-piece suit, Dave playing a cello in a field, and a very inquisitive cow. Destiny now belonged to the duo.

So travel the world and the seven seas …. with Eurythmics.