“Lovefool” is track #7 on The Cardigans’s third album First Band on the Moon.

“Lovefool” was the song that propelled The Cardigans to international stardom. US listeners took notice when it was featured on the soundtrack to Baz Luhrmann’s William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes. The song topped the Billboard Hot 100 Airplay and Top 40 Mainstream, but was kept from the Hot 100 because it was not issued as a commercial single (until December 1998, songs were not eligible to chart on the Hot 100 until they got released as single in the US).

Nina Persson penned the lyrics for this song, while Peter Svensson wrote the music. Nina was sitting in an airport waiting for a plane when she was inspired to write the song and thought it would have a “slow bossa nova feel.” She told The Swedish Performing Rights Society: “I do find that the biggest hits are the ones that are the easiest to write”.

Peter recalled writing the music for this song in an interview with The Independent:

To me, that song is still that moment when I wrote it in a small room, sitting on my bed in our home town. It was supposed to be some kind of a bossa nova: a totally different song, slow and mellow and sad. The production on it, though, and the disco drums made it all shinier."

The terms “love” and “fool” have been frequently combined and thrown around, dating as far back as Shakespeare’s Sonnet LVI (26), in the lines:
So true a fool is love, that in your will,
Though you do anything, he thinks no ill.
The narrator in the sonnet is just like the speaker in the song, who “thinks no ill” of the person he/she is writing about, and acknowledges that this makes them a “fool”. The other famous combination of “love” and “fool” emerges in Jane Austen’s 19th century novel, Pride and Prejudice, in the well-known quote: we are all fools in love.

The chorus is well known from a Season 3 episode of The Office (U.S.) titled “Initiation.”