Plain White T’s “Hey There Delilah” hit #1

Hey There Delilah Plain White T’s

Writer(s): Tom Higgenson (see lyrics here) Released: January 25, 2005 (album cut) Released: May 9, 2006 (single) First Charted: March 17, 2007 Peak: 12 BB, 14 DG, 2 RR, 3 AC, 12 A40, 11 AA, 3 MR, 2 UK, 13 CN, 3 AU, 1 DF (Click for codes to charts.) Sales (in millions): 4.48 US, 1.8 UK, 10.5 world (includes US + UK) Airplay/Streaming (in millions): 0.6 radio, 116.16 video, 1055.27 streaming

Awards: Click on award for more details.

About the Song: “The sensitive white guy with the acoustic guitar will never, ever die…The archetype has been around, at the very least, since the ’50s folk revival, though god knows it might’ve already been a cliché by then…During the George W. Bush administration, a few sensitive white guys with acoustic guitars made chart-topping hits.” SG “Plain White T’s are a super-polished pop-punk band, not an acoustic-guitar situation…but ‘Hey There Delilah’…is a total sensitive acoustic-guitar white-guy song. It might be that decade’s purest example of the form.” SG The group formed in 1997 in Illinois. They released two albums before a shake-up led to the departure of two members. The group’s third album, 2005’s All That We Needed, didn’t chart but eventually went gold. It fit into the emo wave spearheaded by, frankly, more successful bands like Dashboard Confessional, Fall Out Boy, Jimmy Eat World, My Chemical Romance, and Paramore, but Plain White T’s were the only one to land a chart-topping hit on the Billboard Hot 100. That song, “Hey There Delilah,” took two and a half years to go from it is initial January 2005 release to #1 in July 2007. The song first showed up on the All That We Needed album and then again on an EP in 2006. After the group signed to Hollywood Records, they released their fourth album, Every Second Counts, in 2007. It featured a couple of songs from the previous album, including “Hey There Delilah.” The album also reached gold status and peaked at #10 on the Billboard album chart. The song depicts a fictionalized, long-distance relationship, but the namesake is based on a real person. Tom Higgenson, the lead singer of Plain White T’s, met the real-life Delilah DiCrescenzo, a professional distance runner, in Chicago in 2002. He said “she was the most beautiful girl I had ever seen” WK and told her he’d write a song for her even though she said she had a boyfriend and wasn’t interested. When she heard the song, she said “it was so beautifully written” WK but she also worried she’d led him on and gave him the wrong impression. SG Stereogum.com’s Tom Breihan says, “’Hey There Delilah’ has a simple, memorable melody, and it stands out…from the rest of the 2005 emo class, and from the rest of the stuff that was on the radio at the time.” SG However, he attacks the song as “profoundly wimply…boring, and just slightly off-putting” SG and that it “sounded like Starbucks music, like Grey’s Anatomy music” SG while also acknowledging that people are are drawn to it because it is “plainspoken and specific.” SG Frankly, these are the kinds of assessments that lead to people’s negative views of critics. Resources: DMDB encyclopedia entry for Plain White T’s SG Stereogum (3/22/2023). “The Number Ones” by Tom Breihan WK Wikipedia First posted 4/9/2024.