4 No. 1 Hits From the 2000s That Everyone Forgot About (But I Didn’t)

Some songs stay stuck in our heads years after their release. There are others we need to be reminded of from time to time. Here are a few songs from the early 2000s that most people forget about.

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“A Moment Like This” by Kelly Clarkson

Plenty of people remember Kelly Clarkson‘s big hits like “Stronger” and “Breakaway” as being the soundtracks to their childhood, but “A Moment Like This” is one that kind of slips under the radar. When this song came out, Clarkson had just won the first season of American Idol.

This song was actually written for American Idol and recorded individually by all the contestants before Clarkson won the competition.

“Fallin’” by Alicia Keys

Written and produced by Keys for her debut album, “Fallin’” is one of the songs in her discography that made Keys a star. The song talks about truly falling deeply for someone for the first time. Keys told Billboard about her thought process when writing the R&B hit.

“I wanted to write a song for someone who was 10 or 12 years old – like a young Michael Jackson,” she shared. “Even though he was young, he was singing some deep stuff back then. [“Fallin’”] is about the ins and outs of a relationship. Sometimes, you’re completely head-over-heels in love with someone, and sometimes you can’t stand that person. You fall in and out, sometimes it goes back and forth, and that’s just what relationships are about.”

“This Is Why I’m Hot” by Mims

“This Is Why I’m Hot” is one of those songs that just kind of makes you chuckle, even though, admittedly, there are some pretty clever lines in there. Shawn Mims, who released the song as his debut single, later explained that one of his more clever lines actually got some people pretty riled up back in the day.

“One of the biggest lines people have criticized is ‘I don’t gotta rap / I can sell a mil saying nothing on the track,’” he told Stereogum in 2017. “Which is honestly a double entendre because it says that I’m so confident that I don’t even need to say anything in order for people to receive me well, and the other half of it was about the state of hip-hop, where, you know, someone could literally have no lyrical content whatsoever and become an overnight celebrity or make millions of dollars doing it.”

“Makes Me Wonder” by Maroon 5

In 2007, Maroon 5 released “Makes Me Wonder” as a single for their second album. Strangely enough, this song was actually written about the war in Iraq at the time. If you look at most of the lyrics, this theory doesn’t totally line up, but there are a few lines in the chorus that could maybe make sense.

Give me something to believe in
‘Cause I don’t believe in you anymore, anymore
I wonder if it even makes a difference to try
Yeah, so, this is goodbye.

“There is so much going on in America at the moment,” Levine said in an interview at the time. “I hope we (the US) can dig ourselves out of this hole. There’s a bunch of confusion going on in the world.”

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