"Truly Madly Deeply" is a song by Australian pop band Savage Garden, released as the third single from their self-titled debut album in March 1997 by Columbia Records, Roadshow Music and Sony Records. It won the 1997 ARIA Music Award for Single of the Year and Highest Selling Single along it nominated for ARIA Music Award for Song of the Year. Written by bandmates Darren Hayes and Daniel Jones, the song is a reworking of a song called "Magical Kisses" that the pair wrote together long before recording began on their debut album. It was used as the main theme from the soundtrack of the 1998 film Music from Another Room, starring Jude Law and Gretchen Mol.
The song reached number one in Australia in 1997 and in the United States the following year. Two music videos were filmed for the track—one for its original Australian release, and another for the international market shot in Paris.
Originally released in Australia as the third single off their self-titled debut album (after debut hit "I Want You" and "To The Moon And Back"), this passionate love song became a worldwide hit, the album selling 11 million copies globally, when a radio station in Dallas added it to their playlist.
Savage Garden is the Australian duo of Darren Hayes and Daniel Jones, who wrote this song together. When it hit
#1 in the US, it was the first Australian record in 15 years (since Men at Work) to achieve the US top position.
This spent a record 123 weeks on the US Adult Contemporary chart, topping it for 11 weeks. In 2011, Billboard magazine published their list of the top 100 Adult Contemporary songs of all time, and "Truly Madly Deeply" came in at
#1, ahead of the
#2 "Lead Me On" by Maxine Nightingale and
#3 "Drift Away" by Uncle Kracker. Darren Hayes said of the certification: "I'm completely overwhelmed to be honest. I feel incredibly proud. That song changed my life and apparently continues to do so!"
This was originally an older Savage Garden song called "Magical Kisses," which they reworked to become "Truly Madly Deeply." It was included on the band's first-ever demo cassette that they shopped to labels in 1994. Vocalist Darren Hayes recalled to Billboard magazine in 2011: "The verses were exactly the same, but I'm rather embarrassed to admit the chorus did not exist. Instead, I'd written a rather awful lyric about magical kisses.
There was always something incredibly magical about the song, however, and when it reached the ears of producer Charles Fisher, who produced the first Savage Garden album, he proclaimed it to be a potential hit.It sat on the bottom of the pile of our demos for the entire eight month recording process until the eve of the last day. I sat alone, at the Bayswater Cafe in Sydney, and completely re-wrote the chorus you hear today over a cup of coffee. I sang it the next day and the rest is history."
This was the love theme in the Jude Law movie Music From Another Room.