Natasha Bedingfield Revealed This 1 Unbelievable Secret About Her Anthem Unwritten
There is no disputing it: Unwritten by Natasha Bedingfield has been an absolute anthem since its initial release almost 20 years ago in November 2004.
After all, can anyone really resist singing along to “saring at the blank page before you, open up the dirty window, let the sun illuminate the words that you could not find...” when the song plays?
I know I can’t.
The song is catchy as hell and features in quite a few films, including most recently the Sydney Sweeney flick Anyone But You.
However, Natasha revealed in a Vice documentary that the gorgeous gospel choir featured in the song... isn’t actually a choir.
The secret behind the choir sound in Unwritten
In the documentary, aptly named The Story of Unwritten by Natasha Bedingfield, the singer said: “We didn’t have access to a choir, so I was like, ‘well, my sister’s in town, why don’t we just get her over and we’ll just stack up the vocals?’.”
Natasha went on to explain that they performed the song “hundreds of times” to build up the sound of the choir.
They did this by singing in different pitches to ensure the entire breadth of the choir was covered.
She added: “It was so fun and we couldn’t really like take it out once it was in there, it was just so inspired that we were like ‘yeah that stays.’”
It may have felt like an experimental gamble at the time but wow did it pay off!
The song went on to be nominated for a Grammy, went Platinum in the US, and spent 37 weeks in UK charts.
Unwritten is also popular on TikTok, with over 675k posts using the song.
‘I think I’m allowed to get excited now’
Speaking to The Standard, Natasha said on the success of the song in 2004: “I just remember my first manager when I got my first hit saying, ‘Don’t get too excited’
“It was a very British [thing to say], ‘Don’t get too excited’, like, ‘You got to have a few more hits’ but I think I’m allowed to get excited now after 20 years.”
Well, given that the song has been in the charts again this year for 20 weeks to date thanks to the success of Anyone But You, we couldn’t agree more.
