On This Day in 2005, KT Tunstall Released This Early 2000s Earworm She Wrote About Being Jealous of Patti Smith

Finding a radio station, public place, or a VH1 Countdown episode that didn’t include KT Tunstall was next to impossible in the mid-2000s. Hits like “Black Horse and the Cherry Tree,” the title track from her 2004 album debut, and “Suddenly I See,” which she released the following year, became inescapable earworms that floated around the Billboard Hot 100 and other international charts.

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Strangely enough, the very song that would propel Tunstall to fame was one she wrote about being frustrated that her musical career wasn’t going anywhere. She was directing those feelings toward Patti Smith—or, more specifically, Patti Smith’s album cover.

And before she knew it, Tunstall got what she craved so badly while peering into the indifferent eyes of Smith on the cover of Horses.

KT Tunstall Releases This Catchy Earworm on August 29, 2005

Scottish singer-songwriter KT Tunstall splashed onto the scene with her 2004 debut album, Eye to the Telescope, which featured the hit single, “Black Horse and the Cherry Tree”. The catchy rhythm of the verses and easily singable chorus made it an instant international hit, topping the alternative charts in the U.S. and Canada and enjoying Top 20 success elsewhere around the world. Tunstall’s follow-up to her U.S. release of “Black Horse and the Cherry Tree” was another Eye to the Telescope song, “Suddenly I See”.

A lot rode on Tunstall’s second single. The pressure of recreating the success of her first American hit undoubtedly led to questions of whether the follow-up would boost her sales further or mark a career-ending downward shift to one-hit-wonder-dom. Luckily for Tunstall (and the rest of us who spent the mid-2000s singing this song), “Suddenly I See” was another chart success.

With two Top 20 singles in the States, Tunstall was officially a household name, becoming a regular addition to radio playlists, television shows, and the occasional chick flick (looking at you, The Devil Wears Prada). The success of “Suddenly I See” was somewhat ironic, given that Tunstall wrote the song about feeling jealous of Patti Smith and the “Because the Night” singer’s success after years of trying and failing to “make it” in the business.

Authenticity Paid off With This Early 2000s Hit

KT Tunstall wrote the song that would come to define her entire career in half an hour while sitting in her small basement flat in London. In the wee hours of the morning, Tunstall was looking at her record collection when she landed on Patti Smith’s Horses. The 1975 album’s cover features a black and white photograph of Smith casually leaning up against a wall, jacket loosely draped over her shoulder, chin slightly jutted forward, looking at the camera with a gaze that all but trapped Tunstall inside of her own jealousy.

“I was looking at her, thinking, ‘I want to be her,’” Tunstall told the Colorado Springs Gazette in 2019. “And I was p***ed off. I was envious. I was looking at her, and she didn’t even look like she was trying. She’s just being. I had been trying to get somewhere for ten years as a musician. I was so tired of trying and trying and trying.”

But try again she did, and this time, it paid off. Her global Top 40 hit garnered Tunstall the Ivor Novello Award for Best Song Musically and Lyrically in 2006. Dressed in a loose-fitting collared shirt and donning a similarly indifferent, “just being” facial expression, Tunstall paid homage to the album cover that inspired her to write “Suddenly I See”, a song Tunstall described as a “promise of getting to a place where you’re just being.”

Photo by J.Tregidgo/WireImage