You're Beautiful

James Blunt wrote 'You're Beautiful' with Sacha Skarbek and Amanda Ghost for his 2004 debut album Back to Bedlam, and the story in the song is exactly the one he told: he passed his ex-girlfriend on the London Underground with her new man. 'She and I caught eyes and lived a lifetime in that moment,' he explained to Oprah Winfrey in March 2006 — a whole doomed romance compressed into one subway glance and a chorus that refuses to move on from it.

Released as a UK single in May 2005, it sat at number one there for five consecutive weeks. Then came the slowest possible American conquest: it debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 at number 88 and climbed for 17 weeks before finally reaching number one — making Blunt the first British artist to top the Hot 100 since Elton John's 'Candle in the Wind 1997.' The video was its own inescapable image: Blunt alone in falling snow, deadpan, emptying his pockets and shedding layers before diving off a cliff into the sea. The song drew three Grammy nominations for 2007 — Record of the Year, Song of the Year, and Best Male Pop Vocal Performance.

Then the backlash, which became as much a part of the song as the melody. Ubiquity on adult-contemporary radio, in dentist offices, in every 2006 wedding-and-breakup playlist turned it into shorthand for overexposure — Blunt himself said in 2014 that it had been 'force-fed down people's throats.' Two decades on, the opening bars still teleport anyone who owned a 2006 radio straight back — to the year one falsetto 'You're beautiful' was everywhere you went.