Cover Story: Lorde's 'Everybody Wants to Rule The World' Embraces the Original's Dark Undertone

The eerie undertones of Tears For Fears’ 1985 hit set the tone for Lorde’s chilling reimagining of the frequently covered classic.

Cover Story highlights what makes cover songs interesting in comparison to their original versions, whether they stay true to the source material or reimagine it entirely.

Written by Audrey Vieira

Photos courtesy of Michael Putland and Andrew Whitton

If you search for “Everybody Wants To Rule The World” on any streaming service, it seems like everybody wants to cover Tears For Fears’ 1985 hit. Countless renditions of the song have been released by various artists, from punk-rock poet Patti Smith to the cast of “Glee.” And, for the most part, these covers are fine. At best, none of these artists completely butcher the original. At worst, however, some of these covers fail to recognize the darkness disguised within the original’s poppy production. 

Thankfully, Lorde takes a different path. Her cover of “Everybody Wants To Rule The World,” recorded in 2013 for the soundtrack to “The Hunger Games: Catching Fire,” doesn’t shy away from the song’s messages about power, corruption, and Cold War anxieties. If anything, she embraces these themes in all their dystopian glory by drawing more attention to the song’s haunting lyrics, singing them as if she’s warning listeners about impending doom.

Tears For Fears’ warnings about the dangers of power and the horrors of war were always present in the original version of “Everybody Wants To Rule The World,” but they weren’t obvious to all listeners. The iconic pop song has everything — groovy production, a catchy hook, and the looming specter of nuclear war — but said production and hook juxtapose its actual subject matter. The song’s main chorus and titular line, “Everybody wants to rule the world,” is disguised by bright production and jovial delivery from vocalist Roland Orzabal, whose repetition of the lyric almost desensitizes listeners to the track’s true meaning. In a 2017 Yahoo! interview, bassist Curt Smith said he and Orzabal “were really discussing the Cold War” when they initially wrote the song. The lyrics make this commentary obvious. The bridge, “There’s a room where the light won’t find you / Holding hands while the walls come tumbling down” depicts a fallout shelter during a bombing, though upbeat instrumentals make this message sound more danceable than dire.

Lorde’s reimagining of “Everybody Wants To Rule The World,” on the other hand, lets these doomy lyrics shine by building up to them over the course of menacing instrumentals. Her version is a bit shorter than the original — cutting Tears For Fears’ final chorus and instead ending with the bridge — but these changes are for the better. Somber piano and booming percussion reflect the true tone of the original’s lyrics, which Lorde delivers with a chilling tone. As she sings the opening verse: “Welcome to your life / There’s no turning back,” it doesn’t feel like a warm welcome, but a horrifying revelation that war has already begun.

The next few lines, “...We will find you / Acting on your best behavior / Turn your back on Mother Nature / Everybody wants to rule the world,” feel even more ominous in the context of “Catching Fire.” One could even interpret them as a threat from President Snow, leader of the tyrannical Capitol that established the Hunger Games, to protagonist Katniss Everdeen as she becomes an unwitting symbol of rebellion. Lorde sings these lines with a haunting degree of gravity; the polar opposite of Orzabal’s more cheerful cadence on the original recording.

Each moment of Lorde’s cover is more foreboding than the last. Drums pick up their pace and synths blare like an approaching siren, creating an increasing sense of dread as the song’s climax draws closer. These instrumentals briefly come to a halt as Lorde delivers the song’s titular lyric, but they resume louder than ever as her cover comes to an eerie yet epic finale. She revives the bridge that Tears For Fears buried beneath an upbeat disguise in its purest form — as a dire warning about the horrors of war.

Although Lorde’s cover is quite literally designed for dystopia, it works because it’s not dark for the sake of edginess. The darkness always existed within the Tears For Fears original — Lorde simply sheds the subtlety. Unlike some covers that just remake a song in its original state with the only difference being the musicians at the helm, Lorde makes “Everybody Wants To Rule The World” into something new, all while paying true homage to what it has always been.