Blunt

It might go dormant for a while, especially during periods where louder, rowdier, more boisterous music takes over the pop charts. But soft rock balladry is ...

In the US, “You’re Beautiful” took longer to break through, but heavy radio and VH1 exposure were finally enough to get the ballad up to #1. But then came the “You’re Beautiful” video. “You’re Beautiful” wasn’t the first single from James Blunt’s Back To Bedlam album. James Blunt recorded “You’re Beautiful” with a team of session musicians and with some string players. In that Guardian piece, Blunt says that he then “went home and wrote the words to ‘You’re Beautiful’ in two minutes.” In the song, Blunt has a lyric about being “fucking high” when he saw her, and apparently he really was baked. Lyrically, “You’re Beautiful” is a little lost and non-linear. Both Skarbek and Ghost are credited with co-writing “You’re Beautiful,” and both would go on to tons of success. James Blunt was up in the bodega like “let me get a pack of Philly Mes.” When James Blunt went to work with Tom Rothrock, he already had a few songs fully written, and one of those songs was “You’re Beautiful.” The song’s story goes like this: James Blunt ran into an ex on the London Underground one day. He went to boarding schools and then to the University Of Bristol, where he wrote a dissertation about the marketing of pop idols. Instead, that distinction goes to a former captain in the British army, a man whose entire sales pitch was basically “what if Jeff Buckley was still alive and also boring as fuck?” This man only topped the American charts for a single week, and then he never approached that apex again. Natasha Bedingfield’s “Unwritten” — a sunshine superblast that, at the very least, is adjacent to this whole soft rock thing — made it to #5 on our charts.