Four chords, no drums, a string section that only shows itself at the end, and a title borrowed from chemistry. It is the biggest song an English band had in the American grunge era, and its writer has said he was mostly a conduit for it.
Here is what “Glycerine” is about, why the title is not as strange as it looks, and what the strings are doing there.
The Short Answer
Gavin Rossdale wrote it about a relationship that was going badly. The title comes from the chemistry: glycerine is used to stabilize nitroglycerin, and Rossdale has explained the song in terms of love behaving like an explosive that needs handling. The comparison is the whole idea.
The Story Behind the Song
Bush formed in London in 1992. Sixteen Stone was recorded at Westside Studios in London in 1994, produced and engineered by Clive Langer and Alan Winstanley, whose previous credits included Madness and Elvis Costello, with the band sharing production.
Rossdale has said the song came together very quickly in a basement flat in London, and that when he played it to the band he felt there was something ancient about it, as though he had found it rather than written it.
Trauma and Interscope released it to American radio in November 1995 as the fourth single from the album, with a commercial release in January 1996. Rossdale is the sole credited writer.
Why is it called Glycerine?
Because of what glycerine does. It is a stable compound used in medicine, food and cosmetics, and it is also what nitroglycerin is stabilized with. Rossdale’s explanation has been that the song treats love as something with the same properties: useful, ordinary, and capable of taking the building down.
That reading fits a lyric which spends most of its length describing something delicate being handled by two people who are handling it badly.
Why are there no drums?
Because the band left them off. What is on the record is a voice, a guitar playing the same four-chord cycle almost throughout, and strings. Nothing marks time except the guitar.
On an album otherwise full of loud, dense rock songs, that absence is what made the single stand out. It also made it playable by anybody with an acoustic guitar, which did more for the song’s longevity than any radio campaign.
What are the strings doing?
Holding the whole thing up, and at the end taking over completely. Every other instrument drops away in the final section and the strings finish the record alone.
The parts were added by guitarist Nigel Pulsford in memory of his father, who had died. That fact does not appear anywhere in the lyric, and it explains the quality people describe as ache in a song that is otherwise about a failing relationship.
What do the lyrics actually say?
Less than people assume, and that is deliberate. Rossdale has called the song ancient and mystical and described himself as a conduit, which is another way of saying he did not fully plan it.
The images are seasonal and domestic: weather, distance, things that were fine and then were not. There is one direct reference to a Beatles song, and Rossdale has explained that he used it because most listeners associate that title with happiness, and he wanted something soft to push against in a lyric that is otherwise cold.
Who is it about?
Rossdale has said it came out of a relationship he was in at the time, and accounts of which relationship differ between interviews and reference sources. What he has been consistent about is the subject: a partnership under strain, written while it was still going on rather than afterward.
He wrote “Comedown,” from the same album, about the aftermath of a relationship, describing it as half regret and half celebration.
Where did the name Chez Glycerine come from?
From the money. Clive Langer owned a ski chalet in the south of France and was struggling to keep it before Sixteen Stone. The album sold six million copies in the United States, and Rossdale has said the proceeds saved the property, which Langer then named after the song.
Rossdale’s follow-up remark, delivered dryly in interviews since, is that he has never been invited.
How successful was it?
Number one on Billboard’s Alternative Airplay chart, number four on Mainstream Rock, and number 28 on the Hot 100, which remains the band’s highest placing there. The Kevin Kerslake video won the viewer’s choice award at the 1996 MTV Video Music Awards.
Sixteen Stone reached number four on the Billboard 200 and became the band’s best selling album by a wide margin. A live version recorded with Gwen Stefani charted in 2013.
Why it lasted
Because it is almost nothing. Four chords, one voice, a string arrangement written for a dead man, and a lyric vague enough that listeners have been fitting their own situations into it for thirty years.
Songs that specify everything expire when the situation they describe stops being current. This one specifies nothing, which is why it has stayed the most streamed thing Bush ever recorded.
Ballads like this get remembered as a mood long before anyone remembers the artist, so if you have a line stuck in your head and nothing else, our song lyrics search will tell you what it is.