The Story Behind The Song: Depeche Mode’s epic ‘Personal Jesus’
For as long as Depeche Mode have been around, they never let go of their pop credentials. As much as their music might have a gothic slant, Martin Gore always maintained that they were a pop band before anything else, always trying to find the next big hook for listeners to sink their teeth into. When the band reached the 1990s, though, it was clear that something needed to change.
After playing some of the darkest pop imaginable, Gore mentioned wanting to mix things up, telling Select magazine: “We had perfected a formula by then, and it came to fruition on Music For The Masses. But our sales had become stagnant. We’d sold exactly the same number of albums as A Broken Frame. We realised that if we were going to advance, if we were going to make another record at all, then we would have to change. We needed a new approach; otherwise, we wouldn’t have been challenging anything”.
For Violator, they enlisted producer Flood, who had helped bands like U2 turn their unique brand of post-punk into one of the biggest sounds of the ‘80s. In the first few jam sessions for the album, ‘Personal Jesus’ began coming to life, imagined as a strange western-tinged pop song.
While the tone wasn’t that different from Depeche Mode’s earlier work, the guitar was the biggest surprise. Though never excluded from their sound, the guitar had always taken a back seat to the synths on past Depeche Mode projects. To tell the story of a symbolic Jesus figure coming to save you, the band put the six-string at the front of the mix, lulling you into a trance with the hypnotic bluesy riff.
Though this was a step into new territory for the band, Dave Gahan got the inspiration for the lyrics from rock and roll of old. When combing through Priscilla Presley’s book Elvis and Me, Gore saw Priscilla seeing the king of rock and roll as a larger-than-life figure, making him seem far more messianic than the human at the heart of his career. In a way, Gore made this track into his twisted love song, saying (via Songfacts), “It’s a song about being a Jesus for somebody else, someone to give you hope and care. It’s about how Elvis was her man and mentor and how often that happens in love relationships – how everybody’s heart is like a god in some way, and that’s not a very balanced view of someone, is it?”.
Despite the drastic departure from songs like ‘Everything Changes’, Depeche Mode didn’t sacrifice their earlier sound. Flood creates a dense musical picture in your mind compared to the swirling sounds of keys on their earlier records. Although the song is meant to have a macabre nature, the band leaves a lot of space where the music can rest, with the breakdown consisting of nothing but Dave Gahan’s rhythmic breathing.
As the next generation of rock was coming in, Depeche Mode was also able to toe the line between alternative music and their classic sound with this unique track. It might not have been en vogue to make a song like this back in 1983, but the oncoming grunge and later industrial scene helped sustain the band further on the strength of this release. Even bands like U2 took cues from Depeche Mode, revamping their style to suit the times with the help of Flood on their album Achtung Baby. While respect from your peers may be gratifying, the dark slant of this song was enough to win over the Man in Black as well.
When putting together his final album of cover songs American IV, Johnny Cash singled out ‘Personal Jesus’ as one of the tunes he wanted to try, alongside songs by the Beatles and Nine Inch Nails. During an interview about his bizarre song choice, Cash brought the faith aspect of the song into question, saying: “I heard that as a gospel song. And if you think of it as a gospel song, it works really well. We didn’t have any major disagreement over that song, I just heard that a couple of people had recorded it, the writer wanted me to try it, and I did, and I loved it. And I went for it”.
While Cash’s version stays mostly to acoustic guitar, the gravel in his voice gives the entire song a lived-in quality. Though Cash might hear the original as a sort of gospel song, this is a man who has also been heralded as a personal Jesus by the world of country music.
Over 30 years after the song was released, ‘Personal Jesus’ is still one of the pivotal moments for alternative music in the mainstream. Regardless of how Gore tried to identify their sound, ‘Personal Jesus’ was a shakeup for the pop charts that bridged the gap between the synth-heavy songs we got in the ‘80s and the industrial mayhem that was to come in the next decade. They may have been a pop band in name, but when you work outside the norm, the mainstream comes to you.
