This year’s Summer Songs chart is filled with the type of danceable tracks - Jason Derulo‘s “Want To Want Me,” Fetty Wap‘s “Trap Queen,” Walk The Moon‘s “Shut Up and Dance” - that typically burn on radio during the summer months, but the ultra-sad outlier is somehow dominating all of them.īillboard’s Summer Songs Chart: Check Out The Top 10 Still, it’s traditionally harder for a song like “See You Again” to stand tall in the summer, when uptempo tracks dominate top 40 - the last downtempo Song of the Summer happened 10 years ago, when Mariah Carey‘s “We Belong Together” ruled in 2005.
“From the beginning, I knew that the movie would be a great launching pad, but it’s just one of those songs that I think has always stood on its own.” “You get that emotional connection to that song no matter what it’s related to - it could be Furious 7 and Paul Walker, and it could be just hearing those words,” says Sharon Dastur, SVP of programming at iHeartMedia.
And since there’s no explicit mention of Furious 7 or Walker when the song is played on radio, listeners could interpret and appreciate the song’s message without necessarily acknowledging its movie tie-in. “See You Again” only made it to the top of Billboard’s Radio Songs chart in late May while Furious 7 was in the midst of being replaced at multiplexes. Its radio dominance took more time to develop, as is often the case with hit soundtrack singles: Idina Menzel‘s “Let It Go” was in the top 10 long after Frozen had bowed, and The Weeknd‘s “Earned It” remains near the top of the Hot 100 despite Fifty Shades of Grey being out of theaters for months. 1 on the Hot 100 concurrently with Furious 7‘s release in April, but mostly due to its strong sales and streaming numbers. The biggest factor, however, was that radio took time to catch on. When Khalifa performed “See You Again” on The Voice and on the Billboard Music Awards, the visual ties to Furious 7 were absent, or at least more muted, than in the music video. Part of the prolonged success of “See You Again” has been its natural disassociation from Furious 7 after the song started ruling the Hot 100 chart. After all, who wants to listen to a mournful ballad just as summer is getting underway?Ī lot of people, apparently. One would have assumed that when the movie started bowing out of the public consciousness, so would its de facto anthem.
theaters, having grossed over $600 million domestically and currently showing in fewer than 400 multiplexes nationwide nearly three months after its release. If it starts there, how has it ended when… well, we don’t know when, since “See You Again” is still No. ‘Jurassic World’ Bites Off Biggest Global Debut of All Time “People should walk out of the theater and want this thing,” added Mike Knobloch, Universal Pictures’ film music president. The song was written for the powerful conclusion of Furious 7, specifically designed to touch a nerve and provoke repeated listens after the credits rolled.
“It’s really connected with folks in a meaningful capacity,” Kevin Weaver, Atlantic Records’ president of TV & Film, tells Billboard of “See You Again” in April. Co-star Vin Diesel even warbled the song’s hook at the MTV Movie Awards in April while acknowledging Walker in an acceptance speech. The song’s intrinsic connection to Furious 7 and actor Paul Walker’s real-life death was underlined by its end-credits placement in the film, as well as Walker’s presence in the sob-inducing “See You Again” music video. In case you’ve been living under a rock since early April, Furious 7 is one of the biggest box-office successes of all time, and “See You Again,” the tearjerking single from its soundtrack, exploded just after the movie started vroom-ing into the record books with a $147 million opening weekend.