"Hey There Delilah" by Plain White T's

Plain White T's frontman Tom Higgenson met Delilah DiCrescenzo — a nationally ranked steeplechase and cross-country runner — around 2002 through a mutual friend, and opened with an audacious line: he already had a song about her. No such song existed. She turned him down romantically, and he wrote it anyway, imagining what he'd say if they were together.

"Hey There Delilah" first appeared in 2005 on All That We Needed as a bare acoustic-guitar-and-voice track; the single version added strings arranged by Eric Remschneider. Then it did something songs aren't supposed to do: two years after release, it climbed all the way to #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 in July 2007 — Hollywood Records' first #1 on that chart — and topped charts in Canada, Germany, and Austria. It earned two Grammy nominations in 2008, for Song of the Year and Best Pop Performance by a Duo or Group.

It was the slow-dance and away-message soundtrack of 2007, one whispered verse at a time. DiCrescenzo, meanwhile, became permanently famous as the subject of a love song about a relationship that never happened — she has said that living up to that idealized version of herself was its own strange pressure.