You Must Love Me

Single

You Must Love Me
Performed by: Madonna
Project: Evita
Single release: October 1996
Soundtrack release: November 1996
Songwriters: Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice
Context: Written especially for the 1996 film adaptation of Evita, the song was created to give Eva Perón a newly intimate, vulnerable moment late in the story.

You Must Love Me was written specifically for Madonna’s Evita, arriving twenty years after Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice first created the original musical. Unlike the grand political sweep of Don’t Cry for Me Argentina, this song turns inward, placing Eva Perón in a quieter, more fragile space as illness, love and uncertainty close around her. Performed with piano-led restraint, Madonna’s vocal avoids theatrical excess and instead leans into intimacy, allowing the character’s humanity to surface. As both a new addition to the film and a single in its own right, You Must Love Me became one of the defining emotional moments of the Evita soundtrack.