James Blunt Reveals What His Hit ‘You’re Beautiful’ Is “Really” About as Song Turns 20

NEED TO KNOW

• James Blunt is celebrating the 20th anniversary of “You’re Beautiful”

• The singer is looking back on the song about an ex-girlfriend and how it changed the trajectory of his career

• “You’re Beautiful” hit number one across 10 countries in an explosive release

James Blunt is celebrating 20 years of “You’re Beautiful.”

Marking the milestone on X, Blunt expressed his gratitude at the staying power of the hit song, which was released on May 30, 2005.

He wrote, “20 years ago today, I released a song that bought me this house. Whoever thought a song about being high as a kite on drugs, stalking someone else’s girlfriend would resonate quite so much? Thank you. You guys are beautiful.”

“You’re Beautiful” was the third single released from Blunt’s album, Back to Bedlam, first released in October 2004. It ended up hitting number one across 10 countries in an explosive release that made it one of the songs of the year.

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Blunt has never commented on who, in particular, the song is about, though there were rumors after the song’s release that it was about Dixie Chassay. At the time, Chassay was best known as part of the casting team for Harry Potter & The Prisoner of Azkaban, learning under the tutelage of casting director Jina Jay. It was mentioned in a 2006 profile of Chassay that the song is about her, though she has never commented on it directly.

The singer did give some insight into how the song came to be in a 2020 essay for The Guardian. “One day I was on the underground in London and saw an ex-girlfriend with her new boyfriend. Our eyes met, but we just walked past each other, and I went home and wrote the words to ‘You’re Beautiful’ in two minutes,” he wrote.

“I went to see my songwriter friend Sacha Skarbek in Los Angeles, and, with Amanda Ghost as a co-writer, we finished the song. It’s always been portrayed as romantic, but it’s actually a bit creepy. It’s about a guy (me) who’s high and stalking someone else’s girlfriend on the subway. But everyone has those moments where you wonder: ‘What if I’d said something?’ “

Blunt recalls playing the song at SXSW, the beginning of a huge shift that came when Linda Perry expressed interest in signing him.

“The label asked me to remove the words ‘f—— high’ from ‘You’re Beautiful,'” he recalls.”I tried ‘particularly high,’ ‘especially high!’ Eventually I sang ‘flying high’ on the radio edit but wanted the released version left as it was. I told them, ‘I was f—— high!’ “

Blunt added, “The song has a false start. I sing “my life is brilliant” twice, which is my little joke, but I think in my elated state, from whatever concoction I might have taken at the time, life did seem really brilliant. The tube certainly looked very colorful.”

Looking back with the knowledge that it propelled his career as a singer and songwriter, Blunt admitted, “I had no idea the song would be such a big hit, and it scared me at first.”

“I thought I’d just be a musician putting out music. The song [released in 2004] became so ubiquitous that it started to irritate people, but I’m still proud of it and I love my job. I sang it at Elton John and David Furnish’s civil ceremony and I’m about to start my sixth world tour. Without ‘You’re Beautiful,’ it’d be a tour of north London.”

Read the original article on People