"Wherever You Will Go" by The Calling

The Calling came out of Los Angeles, formed by singer Alex Band and guitarist Aaron Kamin, who had been dating Band's sister. The two had been writing together since 1996 and gigging under names like Generation Gap and Next Door, the second a nod to Ron Fair, the record executive who happened to be Band's neighbor. By 1999 Fair was impressed enough by the demos to sign them to a development deal at RCA.

Kamin wrote "Wherever You Will Go" after his grandmother's best friend died. At the funeral he found himself thinking about her husband of more than 50 years, and "what it would be like to be him and have your whole life change so dramatically and not for the best in a matter of moments." The song sat unnoticed until Kathy Nelson, then president of film music at Disney, heard it. "Kathy apparently said, 'That song is a fucking monster. I need it in this movie I'm working on,'" Kamin told Billboard. The movie was Coyote Ugly, in 2000, and after that Fair invited the band to make an album.

The single came out on May 22, 2001, ahead of the debut album Camino Palmero that July. It peaked at No. 5 on the Billboard Hot 100 and reached No. 1 on the Adult Top 40 on December 22, 2001, where it stayed for 23 weeks. It topped the charts in Italy, New Zealand and Poland, went to No. 3 in Britain and No. 5 in Australia. Two videos were shot; the one everyone saw was directed by Gregory Dark and put the band in the Los Angeles River channel while a teenage soap opera played out in front of them: a girl gets her boyfriend's name tattooed on her shoulder, catches him cheating, destroys his things, and turns up at the end with a new boyfriend and a flower inked over the name.

Camino Palmero went platinum and peaked at No. 36, and critics were mostly unkind to both the album and the song. The band broke up in 2005 and re-formed in 2016 with Band as the only original member, but the song never needed them. It is still the one everyone knows the words to.