Benson Boone’s Beautiful Things has become one of the biggest hits of 2024, but Evan Blair, who co-wrote and produced the song, had admitted that no one was chasing success when they worked on the record and that it doesn’t conform to any kind of commercial playbook.
“With Beautiful Things, we made just about every wrong choice you could make in terms of the most surefire way to have success,” Blair told Music Week. “But maybe that’s why it worked out in the end.”
Part of the potential problem - though it didn’t turn out that way - was that Beautiful Things came together from two different song sections that didn’t naturally fit together.
“I realised we had written the two parts in two different time signatures - 4/4 and 6/8,” says Blair. “That’s a cool idea, but as the producer I had to figure out how to make these two things work together.
“We ended up being able to bridge them together, but it was very ambitious and probably took a month to finish. We were all passionate about the idea and really wanted to make it work, so we stuck with it.”
Beautiful Things began life as a piano ballad - Boone and Jack LaFrantz had some chords and a melody that they thought could work - but the big tonal shift comes when that 6/8 section kicks in and Blair introduces his harder-edged guitar part. This, though, almost came about by accident.
“I pulled out a guitar connected to my default pedals, which were set to a distorted sound from something I was doing the day before,” remembers Blair. “I didn’t consciously make a choice, but if I had been thinking about it I probably wouldn’t have used that setup.”
Boone, though, was inspired by what he was hearing: “I played along using that very distorted guitar sound and Benson’s eyes went really wide,” says Blair. “You could tell that it had unlocked something in his brain. From my recollection, Benson’s reaction to it was immediate. I don’t remember what words he started singing, but it might even have been, ‘Please stay.’”
I played along using that very distorted guitar sound and Benson’s eyes went really wide. You could tell that it had unlocked something in his brain.
This is the pivotal lyric in what might loosely be called Beautiful Things’ chorus. And, according to Blair, when Boone was recording it, he didn’t hold back.
“He might kill me for saying this, but Benson was screaming the chorus part with his shirt off because it was so intense!” he says. “He’s got an unbelievable voice and he’s a phenomenally easy vocalist to record. He sounds good straight away, like the words are just rolling out of his soul.”
Beautiful Things was teased on TikTok in December 2023, and quickly started to gain traction. Prior to its release in January 2024, though, Blair still wasn’t convinced that it was going to be a hit.
“I saw TikTok heating up a few weeks before release and you’re grateful, but you often think, ‘It’s gonna go downhill from here…’ - but on the day of release I knew straight away it would be a hit,” he says. “I went to watch Benson perform the song for Amazon and was standing next to his publisher who was logged into Spotify For Artists. It had only been out for 10 minutes when we looked, but the streams were just wild.”
Since then, Beautiful Things has been pretty much inescapable - it reached number two on the US Billboard Hot 100 and topped the charts in many other countries, including the UK. Boone has since performed the song live with Lana Del Rey, and it’s still riding high on music streaming services.
Not bad for a record that Blair says was created while “ignoring pop sensibilities”. And, although he can’t really say why Beautiful Things has been so successful, he does have one theory why it’s become so popular.
“The only through-line on the big songs I’ve worked on is there was something interesting about them,” he says. “Although on the day we wrote any of them I could not have said they were going to be big hits.”
