She & Him is probably the last group you expected to appear on the Billboard Hot 100, but this happened during the month of December. ‘I Thought I Saw Your Face Today’, the best song from She & Him’s debut, ‘Volume One’, published in 2008, entered the US singles chart at number 99 weeks ago and, over the last few days, has continued to climb positions – slowly – until settling, right now, at number 72. Let’s remember that She & Him was the musical duo of the singer-songwriter M. Ward and the actress and singer Zooey Deschanel, dedicated to pop retro
The culprit of this success, of course, is TikTok, where I Thought ‘I Saw Your Face Today’ has gone massively viral, associated with a trend in which people upload nostalgic and sentimental montages of their lives accompanied by the song.
It is no mystery that the most unlikely song goes viral on TikTok, even demos leaked to the internet. But it has merit that an independent release from Merge Records released 17 years ago achieves it. M? Ward on Billboard? Seeing is believing.
In fact, it attests to the real success of ‘I Thought I Saw Your Face Today’ that the song has entered the Billboard, and also that it has settled on Spotify’s global chart, where it remains no less than in position 24, after Christmas.
She & Him have responded to the success of ‘I Thought I Saw Your Face Today’ by releasing a lyric video for the song. For her part, Deschanel has expressed that “I can’t believe that the first song I wrote is having its moment on Billboard 20 years later.”
