Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood

"Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood" is a song written by Bennie Benjamin, Horace Ott and Sol Marcus for American singer-songwriter and pianist Nina Simone, who recorded the first version in 1964 for her album Broadway-Blues-Ballads.

Composer and arranger Horace Ott came up with the melody and chorus lyrics after a temporary falling out with his girlfriend (and wife-to-be), Gloria Caldwell.

[5] The Animals' lead singer Eric Burdon would later say of the song, "It was never considered pop material, but it somehow got passed on to us and we fell in love with it immediately.

[10] During Animals concerts at the time, the group maintained the recorded arrangement, but Burdon sometimes slowed the vocal line down to an almost spoken part, recapturing a bit of the Simone flavor.

Their version of the song was first released in summer 1977 as a 16-minute epic that took up an entire side of their Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood album, which was picked up for greater worldwide distribution by their label at the time, Casablanca Records.

[15] Instrumental sections of this version were used in the pilot for the US game show Bullseye and in the 2003 Quentin Tarantino film Kill Bill: Volume I, in the background during the final duel between The Bride (Uma Thurman) and O-Ren Ishii (Lucy Liu).

The song was a late addition to the album; Costello had originally intended to record "I Hope You're Happy Now", but throat problems during the final sessions prevented him from doing so.

He explained, "My US record company, Columbia, showed their customary imagination in releasing the safe 'cover' song as a single ahead of any of the more unusual and heartfelt balladry I had composed.

'Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood' made little impression, and my mounting debt to the company seemed to make them unwilling to risk any further effort on my behalf".

Stereogum reviewed cover versions of the song in 2015, including renditions by Joe Cocker, Yusuf Islam, and Lana Del Rey.