James Blunt is famous for his hit “You’re Beautiful.” The heartbreaking love ballad put Blunt on the map, establishing him as a balladeer who tugs at the heartstrings. Co-written by Blunt, Sacha Skarbek and Amanda Ghost, the song became a mainstay on the radio in 2005 – so much so that it landed on top of the Billboard Hot 100, Adult Top 40, Adult Contemporary and Pop 100 charts, among many others. Despite its success, the song was widely labeled as “annoying” and made it onto several media lists for worst songs. So how does Blunt feel about his signature hit?
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In a 2014 interview with British magazine, Hello!, the singer revealed that he sympathizes with people who aren’t fans of the song. “There was one song that was force-fed down people’s throats, ‘You’re Beautiful,’ and it became annoying,” he admitted. “And then people start to associate the artist with the same word.”
Blunt goes on to say that he feels the song’s reputation misrepresents him as an artist and how even though the video for the song is dark (Blunt seemingly commits suicide at the end by jumping off a cliff into an open abyss in the rain), it doesn’t reflect his multi-dimensional artistry.
“I think, at the end of the day, I was marketed by a record company to appeal to women during Desperate Housewives’ commercials and you lose 50 percent of the population in doing so,” he observed. “The marketing also painted me out as an insanely serious person, an earnest person and, as all my friends know, I’m anything but. I have a couple of over-emotional miserable songs that I’m known for, but I think it’s turned that corner now. People can see I don’t take myself that seriously.”
[RELATED: James Blunt on the Meaning Behind “Monsters” and Iam Tongi’s Cover]
Nearly 20 years after the release of “You’re Beautiful,” Blunt has achieved his goal of showing off various sides of himself as a singer/songwriter across six studio albums, with his seventh, Who We Used to Be, set to arrive in October. One of the many songs that demonstrates Blunt’s compelling songwriting is “Monsters.” Featured on his 2019 album, Once Upon a Mind, the song rose to popularity when Iam Tongi covered it during his audition on American Idol season 21. He and Blunt performed it as a duet during the finale where Tongi was crowned the winner.
“[We] wrote this incredibly raw song when I realized that potentially my father could die soon,” Blunt explained to American Songwriter about the meaning of “Monsters.” “In many ways, the song, the lyric, it speaks as if I was speaking the words that I might have said to my children as well. When my children talk about the monsters, that’s [what] I sing to my father. It’s my turn to chase the monsters away like he would have done once with me.”
Who We Used to Be is preceded by a lead single, “Beside You.”
(Photo by Debbie Hickey/Getty Images)
