Songs of Faith and Devotion is the eighth studio album by the English electronic music band Depeche Mode. It was first released on 22 March 1993 in the United Kingdom by Mute Records and a day later in the United States by Sire Records and Reprise Records. The album incorporated a more aggressive, darker rock-oriented tone than its predecessor Violator (1990), largely influenced by the emerging alternative rock and grunge scenes in the United States.
A fan posted the album in its entirety online a few months before the album's official release, representing one of the first music leaks in the music industry. Upon its release, Songs of Faith and Devotion reached number one in several countries, and became the first Depeche Mode album to debut atop the charts in both the UK and the US. It became one of the band's best-selling albums, with sales over 5,000,000 worldwide. To support the album, Depeche Mode embarked on the fourteen-month-long two-legged Devotional Tour, the largest tour they had undertaken to date. Live recordings from the tour were released on the concert video Devotional and live album Songs of Faith and Devotion Live, both released in late 1993.
The album was recorded while lead singer Dave Gahan was suffering from a heroin addiction, and the album and subsequent tour exacerbated growing tensions and difficulties within the band, prompting Alan Wilder to quit Depeche Mode in June 1995. This album is the final one with Wilder as a band member, and also the final Depeche Mode album to be recorded as a quartet. The ordeal had exhausted their creative output following the enormous success they had enjoyed with Violator, leading to rumours and media speculation that the band would split. Depeche Mode subsequently recovered from the experience, and released Ultra in 1997.
Background Depeche Mode had released their previous album Violator in early 1990 and had supported it with a world tour that lasted through the end of that year."Rolling Stone Summer Music Guide 1990", Rolling Stone magazine insert, 1990, page 4 The band, coming off the "peak high" of their successful album and tour, wanted to take a year off before returning to work together.
During the tour, singer Dave Gahan's father had died, and after the tour, he stayed in London for a few months, later saying in an interview with Q magazine that "that's where my [drug] habit got completely out of hand." Gahan elaborated, "It's no secret I've been drinking and using drugs for a long time – probably since I was about 12; popping a couple of my mum's phenobarbitones every now and then; hash; amphetamines; coke came along. Alcohol was always there, hand in hand with drugs. Then all of a sudden I discovered heroin". After that stay in London, Gahan split from his wife Joanne Fox Gahan and young son and moved to Los Angeles to live with his new girlfriend, Teresa Conroy. Gahan and Conroy had met in 1988 when she was the Press Liaison officer for the American leg of their Music for the Masses Tour. Gahan would later say, "I felt really safe in my life in England in lots of ways, and I didn't like it. There I was with a loving, caring wife, a new baby a big house in the country, a couple of cars in the drive, and it just didn't feel right. I wanted to move to California, but Joanne didn't want to." For most of 1991, Gahan had barely any contact with the rest of the band, as he was living in LA with his new girlfriend, and both were enjoying the rock and roll lifestyle. Said Gahan later, "I actually thought, 'There's no fucking rock stars out there anymore. There's nobody willing to go the whole way to do this.' ... So, I dragged by body through the mud, to show that I could do it." Gahan and Conroy "set off on a path of Sid and Nancy-style heroin-led narcotic excess." They started to listen to, and often hang out with, some of the harder rock bands of the time, including Jane's Addiction, Rage Against the Machine, and grunge-era bands like Nirvana, Pearl Jam and Alice in Chains. When Gahan did finally fly to London, to see his son, he ran into his former producer Daniel Miller, who immediately recognised that Gahan was turning into a junkie. Said Miller, "I hadn't seen him for a few months and he looked a classic junkie. He was skinny, he looked terrible. ... He used to do this great impression of a wasted rock star and here he was – he'd become that impersonation, even down to the fact that his problem was so obvious, but he was trying to conceal it from me." At the same time, Gahan and his wife Joanne started a "messy" divorce that took most of the year.
During 1991, band member Alan Wilder recorded his Recoil album Bloodline (1992) and collaborated with the band Nitzer Ebb by remixing a song for their EP As Is (1991) and co-producing their album Ebbhead (1991). In August, Wilder married his long-time girlfriend, Jeri Young.
Songwriter Martin Gore considered working on a new solo album to follow up his 1989 solo effort Counterfeit EP, but he and his partner Suzanne Boisvert instead had a daughter in June, with Gore saying "that had a really positive effect on me. ... You see a life being born and growing, it's just wonderful, it moves you."
In August, bandmate Andy Fletcher had a child with his partner Grainne Mullen, and around the same time he opened a restaurant, Gascogne, in north-west London.
In mid-1991, the band were lured back into the studio to record a new track, titled "Death's Door", for Wim Wenders' upcoming new film, Until the End of the World (1991). Although billed as a full-band effort, Gahan chose not to fly to London to record the vocals, preferring to stay in Los Angeles, so Gore sang vocals for the song instead.
In late 1991, Gore had demos of new songs ready to share with the rest of the band, and they agreed to meet up in early 1992 to start the recording sessions for their new material.
Recording Demos
Gore brought in demos for everyone to hear, and Flood said that they felt like they had a good set of songs to work from. When Gore shared his demos of "I Feel You" and "Condemnation" with the rest of the band, Gahan was happy to hear that they were bluesier and rockier than he had expected. Said Gahan, "It was a total relief! I was so glad Martin [Gore] was moving away from the dance-music formula," and "the lyrics were completely appropriate to the way I was feeling. It was almost like Mart was writing the stuff for me." As Gahan had been spending a year with rock bands in LA, he wanted Depeche Mode's new record to be more rock-oriented. He said, "None of us came back with the idea that we were going to make Violator 2." Gore was feeling tremendous pressure as the group's songwriter, coming off the success of Violator. Fletcher reminded Gore that he works better under pressure, and Miller tried to put the band at ease, saying that if their follow-up was even half as successful as Violator, it would still be considered a success.
Madrid sessions To start recording, the band wanted to rent a studio in Madrid, Spain, but was unable to locate a suitable one. The band chose to record in Spain because "it wasn't in Italy and Denmark", where the band had recorded much of their material over the previous few years. Co-producer Flood, who had worked with the band on Violator and was returning for the new album, had just worked with rock band U2 on their album Achtung Baby. He had seen U2 produce a great album by working and living together for several weeks, and so suggested that approach to the band, saying that they could also rent a house and convert it into a working studio space. Despite having done something similar for the recording of their album Black Celebration in 1985–86 and having seen tensions rise within the group, the band agreed with Flood's suggestion. A villa about thirty miles from Madrid was rented for a few months starting in January 1992. Steve Lyon, who was the sound engineer for the album, arrived in January to start setting up the space for recording. As the villa wasn't designed for recording, Lyon chose rooms "ad hoc" to be production or recording rooms. A studio was set up in the basement of the villa, with two drum kits using different spaces to achieve different sounds. The recordings from the kits could then be processed through synthesizers, such as the large Roland System 700 the band had shipped to Madrid.
In February 1992, the band arrived to begin recording. Initially, recording time was set up in two six-week blocks, with a four-week break in between. The band had barely seen each other for a year, and the day before the sessions started, they met for the first time as a group at a bar in Madrid, and were all surprised to see how Gahan had changed. Gore said "I was a bit confused by it all at first, because we hadn't seen him for a while when we started recording Songs of Faith and Devotion. Suddenly his hair had grown drastically, and he was covered in loads of tattoos." Fletcher described what he saw as "a real massive change." Wilder summed it up by saying "He looked like he'd been living in LA for a year." Gahan would later say that "I'd changed, but I didn't really understand it until I came face to face with Al [Wilder], Mart [Gore] and Fletch. The look on their faces ... battered me."
Unlike for their previous albums, the band decided to forgo their usual pre-production time, where collectively they would have listened to the demos created by Gore and then suggest ideas to establish a creative framework. Flood later called the lack of pre-production a big mistake that adversely affected the early recording sessions. Gahan, influenced by the scene in Los Angeles, wanted to make harder music, also like he'd heard from Nine Inch Nails or Nitzer Ebb, bands that in his words "had a kind of harder and bluesier edge to them. I felt like I wanted that at the time – I wanted to rock!" Wilder agreed that they wanted to do something different, saying "we needed to push the boundaries a bit, and try and do something completely different to Violator. I'm sure, subconsciously, there was a big pressure to repeat that success, and the obvious thing to do would have been to make a very similar record. None of us really wanted to do that, and I think particularly Flood, Dave [Gahan] and myself wanted to make it as different as we could, and surprise people with it." As a result, according to Wilder again, "After some discussion between myself, Flood and the others, we agreed that our approach should be more towards performance whilst trying to push ourselves into areas we hadn't explored. Some of the songs like 'I Feel You', 'In Your Room' and 'Rush' suggested a looser, more 'live' feel and it's probably fair to say that myself, Flood and Dave [Gahan] were the main instigators of this open and fluid sound. This more performance–based style of working threw its own spanner in the works which some of us found hard to come to terms with." This desire to make a rock record led to creative differences within the band, with Miller suggesting that Fletcher was the one who found this new way of working hardest to deal with, despite his very limited role in the creative process. Said Wilder, "I suppose the emphasis is much more on performing on this record, but once that performance was created, we applied all the technology we've come to know and love over the years to put it together in a way that's still uniquely Depeche Mode."