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The Quebec girl who slept in a dresser drawer, won Eurovision, and ended the decade owning the biggest song in the world. Céline Dion's "My Heart Will Go On" topped the charts in more than 25 countries, Falling into You won Album of the Year, and then she went to Las Vegas and showed every pop star what a residency could be.
"I'll be your crying shoulder" — the saxophone-and-acoustic ballad that closed Dawson's Creek's first season and then every wedding for a decade. Its writer says it was never a love song at all, but a prayer written at the bottom of a breakup.
Hinder's whispered phone call to an ex — "honey, why you calling me so late?" — that owned radio and ringtones in the fall of 2006. The power ballad every flip phone in America seemed to erupt with, guilty premise and all.
The tin-whistle intro alone can put you back in 1998. Celine Dion's Titanic theme was on every radio station, every wedding dance floor, and every school talent show for the better part of a year — a ballad so inescapable that even the people who made it hadn't wanted it to exist.
"I'm not a perfect person…" — and suddenly it's 2004 in every car, mall, and graduation slideshow in America. Hoobastank's colossal apology ballad spent the year parked near the top of the charts and never really left rock radio's rotation.
The husky contralto behind "Another Sad Love Song," "Breathe Again" and "Un-Break My Heart," two eight-times-platinum albums in a row, and the ballad Billboard named, in 1998, the most successful solo song in Hot 100 history — one she didn't want to record.
![Video thumbnail — Red Hot Chili Peppers - Under The Bridge [Official Music Video]](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/GLvohMXgcBo/maxresdefault.jpg)
A poem about loneliness and addiction that Anthony Kiedis never intended to sing became the Red Hot Chili Peppers' No. 2 smash — the ballad that turned funk-rock's shirtless wild men into MTV's most unlikely heartbreakers.
![Video thumbnail — James Blunt - You're Beautiful (Official Music Video) [4K]](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/oofSnsGkops/maxresdefault.jpg)
James Blunt's fragile falsetto confession — a stranger's glance on the London Underground stretched into three minutes of 'it's true.' It conquered the charts on both sides of the Atlantic in 2005–06, then got played until nobody could stand it. Including Blunt.