This is part of Culture Club, our series on songs that became far more famous as a remix than they ever were in their original form.
The French folk-pop duo Lilly Wood and the Prick put "Prayer in C" on their 2010 debut album, Invincible Friends. It was a stark, acoustic song with a memorable vocal hook and almost no commercial profile outside France. For four years it sat quietly in their catalogue.
In 2014, the German DJ and producer Robin Schulz built a deep-house remix around it. The re-release in June 2014 became one of the biggest dance records of the decade, reaching number one in roughly twenty countries.
The original
The original "Prayer in C" is built on a circling acoustic guitar figure and a haunted, end-of-the-world lyric. It is a good song. It was also, in its first life, the kind of album cut that a band plays live to their existing fans and never sees trouble the charts. There was no obvious path from that recording to a global hit.
What the song had was a hook that lodged in the memory and a vocal with real character. Both survived the transformation that came next.
The remix
Robin Schulz kept the vocal and the guitar motif and dropped them onto a warm, patient deep-house groove. The remix does not rush. It lets the hook breathe over a steady kick and a rolling bassline, turning a folk lament into a record that worked equally well on daytime radio and in a club at midnight.
Released in June 2014, the Schulz remix topped the singles chart in France and went to number one across an extraordinary spread of countries, including Germany, the United Kingdom, Italy, Spain, Sweden, Austria, Belgium, Ireland, Switzerland, and many more. It turned Robin Schulz into one of the most bankable remixers and producers in dance music, a reputation he reinforced soon after with his remix of Mr. Probz's "Waves."
Why it matters
"Prayer in C" is a clean demonstration that a song has no expiry date. Four years passed between the original and the remix. The recording did not change in that time. What changed was that someone heard the hook, recognized what a dance arrangement would do for it, and had the production skill to make the transformation feel inevitable.
For Lilly Wood and the Prick, the remix did not erase the original. It introduced their song, and their name, to an audience hundreds of times larger than the one their album had reached, and the songwriting royalties followed.
This is why we think of back catalogue as dormant rather than dead. Somewhere in every artist's older work there may be a hook that a remix can wake up. The remixer brings the new arrangement and the new audience. The original writer keeps the credit and shares in the result. Both win, four years late.