"Bubbly" isn't about anybody specific. Caillat explained to I Like Music: "It's about the feelings you get when you have a crush on someone and they make you make smile all the time; they give you butterflies and you just adore everything they do."
Inspiration for the song came when she was realizing that, "I didn't have a crush on anyone, and it's always fun to have a crush. So I was just thinking about missing those feelings and wanting them."
Colbie Caillat grew up surrounded by music with her father, Ken Caillat, who co-produced the Rumours and Tusk albums for Fleetwood Mac. She didn't start playing guitar until she was 19, but she wrote "Bubbly" when she was 20, and after a friend set up a MySpace site for the her, she posted the song. It got thousands of hits (a lot in 2005) and an organic campaign developed for it on MySpace, which was the most popular social networking site at the time. This earned her a deal with Universal, who released the song as her first single on May 15, 2007, when Colbie was 21. The song climbed to #5 that October.
Caillat wrote this song with
Jason Reeves, who came to Los Angeles from Iowa and met Colbie his first day in the city. They ended up moving in together (Reeves says she's "like a sister"), and working on songs for her first album. When Songfacts spoke with Reeves in 2011, he said, "The thing about Colbie and I writing is that it's so easy and natural. I really don't know how to describe it beyond that. But I think we're just so comfortable with each other and we're so free with what we're feeling at the moment when we're writing a song that there's not very many walls between us to get in the way."
The word "bubbly" shows up in the lyrics just once ("'cause every time I see your bubbly face"), but suits the mood of the song perfectly. According to Reeves, the original title was "Wherever It Goes," but after playing back the song and listening the whole way through, Caillat decided to call it "Bubbly."
In 2012
Caillat told Songfacts that this was the easiest song she ever wrote. "I seriously wrote it in 20 minutes. It's one of those songs that just came out naturally," she said.
"Bubbly" spent seven nonconsecutive weeks at #5 on the Hot 100. This broke the record for the longest time a single spent at #5 without going higher. Previously "(There's) No Gettin' Over Me" by Ronnie Milsap, "
Hungry Heart" by Bruce Springsteen, "
The Banana Boat Song (Day-O)" by Harry Belafonte and "(Sweet Sweet Baby) Since You've Been Gone" by Aretha Franklin, had all spent five weeks at #5.
The song spent 14 weeks in pole position on the Hot Adult Top 40 Tracks chart, as did Natalie Imbruglia's "
Torn." The only #1 hit by a solo female artist to lead the list longer than these two songs was Avril Lavigne's "
Complicated," which was #1 for 16 weeks in 2002.
Lite-rock radio (often used for at-work listening) gave "Bubbly" lots of airplay in early 2008, helping send it on a remarkable run of 19 weeks on top of the Adult Contemporary chart. That made it the longest-running #1 debut single by a female artist since the AC chart was introduced in July 1961.
Colbie Caillat explained the album title to MTV. "Coco is my nickname," she said. "My parents called me it since I was a baby. And then my friends called me that, now my producer calls me it. So I just, I don't know, I figured that would be a cool name for the album."
Somewhere in the
American Idol archives there might be video of Caillat auditioning for the show with "Bubbly." She first auditioned in season 2 (2003) and was flatly rejected. The next season is when she sang "Bubbly" at her audition, but the screeners still weren't impressed.
"They said no again," Caillat told the
Off The Record podcast. "I wasn't right for the show. I was talked into auditioning. I was very shy and introverted. I had never really performed before, besides a couple of school talent shows."
