Dido wrote "Thank You" after meeting her boyfriend, a lawyer named Bob Page, in 1995 and falling for him hard. Her tea has gone cold and the rain has clouded her window, but seeing his picture on her wall reminds her that it's not so bad.
In this song, she thanks Page for giving her the "best day of her life," which is when they met in a club and had their first encounter. Page sparked a creative fire in Dido, who also wrote the song "
Here With Me" about him. They got engaged in 2001, but broke up a year later, inspiring another Dido song: "
White Flag."
This is the song Eminem sampled on his 2000 hit "
Stan," which uses the first verse as the hook. Eminem's song is from the perspective of an obsessive fan, giving it a whole new meaning: Stan's life is hopeless, but he's buoyed by the kinship he feels with his hero, whose picture is on his wall.
Dido appears in the video as Stan's wife and sang it with Eminem on some of his tour dates.
"Thank You" was used in the 1998 Gwyneth Paltrow movie Sliding Doors in 1998, over a year before it appeared on her debut album, No Angel. It plays over the credits at the end of the film.
The song appears on Dido's 1999 debut album, No Angel. After writing it in 1995, she made her way from London to America, where she played bars and restaurants for two years before Clive Davis at Arista Records heard her demo and signed her. She played the Lilith Fair and got a smattering of airplay, but was little known until Eminem sampled this track. "Stan" hit at the end of 2000, about 18 months after No Angel was released. In response, "Thank You" was issued as a single and rose to #3 in the US in April 2001, about three years after it first appeared in Sliding Doors. The album took off, especially in the UK, where it sold 3 million copies and became the top-selling debut by a female solo artist in history. In America, the album sold 4 million.
Dido wrote this song with Paul Herman, who worked on it with her at her apartment in London. Herman, a songwriter whose songs have also been recorded by Corinne Bailey Rae and Emelie Sande, worked on three other tracks from the album as well. They met through Dido's brother, Rollo Armstrong, who had a band called Faithless that Herman played with.
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Dido wrote the lyric in the bathtub, and says that when she performs the song, she mentally returns to the tub with the soggy piece of paper in her hand.
Eminem did not ask permission to use this on "Stan" until after the song was produced, but Dido loved it agreed to let him use it. She recalled to Billboard magazine in a 2013 interview: "I just got a letter saying, 'We heard your track. We love it. We'd like to use it for this track 'Stan.' Can you take a listen? I hope you like it and can we use your song?' It was completely out of the blue. I put it on like, 'I wonder what he could have done.' You just don't know. And I was a big Eminem fan, so it was pretty cool. And then I heard it. I remember because I had some friends staying in the same hotel. They were literally running down the hall, like 'You gotta listen to this; it's just brilliant!'"
This won Song of the Year at the 2002 ASCAP awards, honoring it as the most successful song of the previous year. ASCAP represents songwriters and makes sure their members get paid when their songs are performed. The award indicates that this song was constantly played on the radio and used in other media where performance rights had to be paid.
The music video was directed by David Meyers and shows Dido getting evicted and her house razed. Dido never got much airplay on MTV (outside of "Stan") but did well on the older-skewing VH1.
Natalie Merchant, who also played the Lilith Fair, had a very thankful song in 1998 with "
Kind & Generous." That same year, Alanis Morissette had a hit with "
Thank U."
