Some songs feel so perfectly matched to the artist who made them famous that it’s hard to picture anyone else singing them. Yet a surprising number of career-defining hits started out as rejects, passed over by one act after another before landing with the person who would turn them into legend. These three cases show just how much timing, instinct, and a little bit of luck shape who actually gets remembered for a song.
1. “…Baby One More Time” – Britney Spears
Before it became the song that launched an entire pop era, “…Baby One More Time” was written by Max Martin with an R&B group in mind. Max Martin first offered the song to TLC under the title “Hit Me Baby (One More Time).” The group turned it down because they misread the hook as a reference to domestic violence, not slang for a phone call, which is what Martin actually intended.
After TLC passed, the song was then offered to Robyn, but it didn’t end up working out. The Backstreet Boys also had a look at it, and Simon Cowell tried to secure it for his new boy band Five, even reportedly offering Martin a Mercedes to change his mind. By the time it reached a then-16-year-old former Mouseketeer named Britney Spears, the song had already been rejected by some of the biggest names in pop, yet it went on to sell more than 1.5 million copies in the UK alone and set the template for teen pop for the next decade.
2. “Torn” – Natalie Imbruglia
Natalie Imbruglia’s signature single has one of the longest and strangest journeys of any 1990s hit. The songwriters Anne Preven and Scott Cutler wrote this song with Phil Thornalley in 1991, and it was first recorded by the Danish singer Lis Sørensen as “Braendt,” with Danish lyrics written by Elisabeth Nielsen, appearing on her 1993 album. That version, sung in Danish under a different title, came and went with barely any international notice.
Preven and Cutler then formed a band called Ednaswap and released the first English version of “Torn” on their 1995 debut album. It still didn’t catch on, and the song was released again in Denmark in 1996, this time by the Norwegian singer Trine Rein. Only when co-writer Phil Thornalley later worked on Natalie Imbruglia’s debut album did “Torn” finally find the version people remember, one that reached number two in the UK and stayed atop the Billboard Airplay chart for fourteen weeks, effectively building her career on a song two other acts had already tried and failed to launch.
3. “Nothing Compares 2 U” – Sinéad O’Connor
Few stories capture the strange afterlife of a discarded song better than this one. The Irish singer is best remembered for her 1990 cover of Prince’s “Nothing Compares 2 U,” a wounded ballad the Purple One wrote in 1984, then gave to his funk-pop side project The Family, who recorded it for their self-titled 1985 debut album. Prince wrote the song in under an hour in a single session with producer Susan Rogers, but he had no interest in releasing it under his own name at the time.
The Family’s version was never released as a single, and the song might have been completely forgotten had it not been for O’Connor. Five years later, O’Connor was working on her sophomore album and came across the original version, then recorded her vocals in one take with a new arrangement alongside producer Nellee Hooper. Her stripped-down rendition became a worldwide number one and remains her signature song, built entirely on a track Prince had once considered too personal, or perhaps too minor, to keep for himself. These three songs share a common thread. Each one was passed over by artists who, for their own reasonable reasons at the time, simply couldn’t see what it would become. What separates the story from a footnote to a legend is almost always the same thing: someone else heard it differently, took the risk, and made it theirs completely.
