"I'll Be" — Edwin McCain

Edwin McCain, a singer-songwriter from Greenville, South Carolina, had put out one major-label album on Lava/Atlantic when he wrote "I'll Be" for his second, Misguided Roses, in 1997. He has said the label was unhappy with his numbers and he was in danger of being dropped, and that he was "drinking and following a course of action that would be described as self-destructive." The song came out of the end of a relationship: "an admission of my inability to function in a relationship, hence the love suicide line," as he put it, and a hope that he would grow into a better person. He called it a Hail Mary prayer, the idea being "maybe if I write my future, it'll come true." The title line was something he had actually said to the woman: don't ever look back on this any other way than I'll be your biggest fan.

It was serviced to radio in October 1997 and climbed slowly. The single version differs from the album cut, opening on electric guitar rather than acoustic with different vocal and saxophone lines, and it debuted on the Hot 100 Airplay chart in February 1998, peaking at number four in November in its thirty-ninth week. Under the chart rules of the day a song needed a physical single to enter the Hot 100 proper, so on September 8, 1998 the label issued a "very limited pressing"; it entered at number seven and peaked at five, McCain's only top-ten hit. That spring it had also scored the season-one finale of Dawson's Creek, "Decisions."

Then it became a wedding song, which McCain finds funny given what it is about. Dr. Phil's viewers voted it the greatest wedding song ever written, and it turned up in A Cinderella Story and on The Office. McCain has made peace with it: "weddings don't have an expiration. Every year there are weddings. I'm not associated with the '90s, I'm associated with weddings." He re-recorded it acoustically for Messenger and again in 2015, and in 2025 sang it one more time as "Nessy" on The Masked Singer.