Watt picked up her thought. “Ambivalence and mixed feelings is a big through line in all our stuff as well,” he said. “That’s true both in the choice of notes we use and in the lyrics that we write. There’s that element of suspension. The space that you leave allows room for the listener. I always like the idea that people can step into our audio picture, you know, and almost walk around in the reverbs.”
A life-threatening health crisis for Watt in 1992 — he has a rare autoimmune disorder, Churg-Strauss syndrome — led Everything but the Girl to pare away verbal and musical frills to reveal rawer feelings on “Amplified Heart” and “Walking Wounded,” the albums that would mark its artistic peak in the 1990s.
“There was a period in the ’90s where we had to learn what it was like to live with each other again, mostly because of the aftermath of my illness, which left me a very changed person,” Watt said. “And Tracey had to witness that change, which was very difficult in its own way. Both ‘Amplified Heart’ and ‘Walking Wounded’ — it’s there in the titles of those albums, you know? — they’re very much songs about us both feeling isolated by the experience, but also learning to live with each other again.”
“Amplified Heart,” released in 1994, included the original version of “Missing.” Then Terry’s club-ready remix with a new, danceable beat, carried Everything but the Girl to a worldwide audience; the single went gold in the United States and platinum in Britain. The song has had an endless afterlife, and a broad influence, for its precise chemistry of melancholy, suspense and propulsion. With Thorn’s voice leaping as she sings “like the deserts miss the rain,” “Missing” is a dance-crying milestone: equally potent on the dance floor or at home alone through headphones.
Watt and Thorn were already intrigued by the fast-evolving music in London’s dance clubs. For its late-1990s incarnation, Everything but the Girl merged moody introspection with electronic dance music for two albums: “Walking Wounded,” and “Temperamental” from 1999. It’s a sound that “Fuse” reclaims and determinedly expands.
“We talked about trying to find new ways of writing, new ways of using our voices, new ways of landing on different notes,” Watt said.
