Songfacts®:

• This song evokes the feelings of breaking up with someone and remembering what they were like. Fergie sings about shelter and clarity - she needs some time to figure out what it is she wants and needs. Although she is mature and grown up, she still feels like a child, especially when she is alone and scared. She will miss the person that left, but her tears are not just for her, but also for him.
  
  The song is a very personal one for Fergie, inspired by a breakup with a boyfriend while she was going through a very difficult time. Lines like, "I need some shelter of my own protection, to be with myself and center," are true-to-life; she was dealing with meth addiction at the time and trying to get her career in order. She says it's about independence.
• "Big Girls Don't Cry" was released in 2006 after Fergie found fame with The Black Eyed Peas, but she wrote it around 2002 at a personal and professional nadir. She had a showbiz upbringing, starring on the show Kids Incorporated from 1984-1989, starting when she was 8 years old. After that she formed a group called Wild Orchid that had a few minor hits in the '90s but never broke through. They were dropped from their label in 2001, so Fergie left the group, attempting a solo career while managing a meth addiction.
  
  Through industry connections she found herself in a songwriting session with Toby Gad, a German songwriter who came to America just two years earlier and was struggling, living on "instant soup and a bagel a day." Together, they wrote "Big Girls Don't Cry" and made a demo, but then she joined The Black Eyed Peas and the song seemed moribund - that group makes high energy party music like "Pump It" and "Boom Boom Pow, not confessional ballads.
  
  The song finally saw the light when Fergie released her first solo album, The Dutchess, in 2006. The first three singles - "London Bridge," "Fergalicious" and "Glamorous" have a Black Eyed Peas sound and were huge hits, with "London Bridge" and "Glamorous" both reaching #1. "Big Girls Don't Cry" was the fourth single; it went to #1 in September 2007, over a year after the album was released. It gave Fergie three chart-toppers from the album, making her the first female solo artist to do that since Christina Aguilera in 1999 with her self-titled debut album.
• In a Songfacts interview with Toby Gad, he talked about writing this song with Fergie. "She came into the session in tears, very distraught," he said. "I asked, 'What's wrong?' And she said she just broke up with her long-distance boyfriend whom she loved very much. And I thought, 'Maybe write him a goodbye letter to explain your feelings.'
  
  Then we were at Sony Publishing in Los Angeles. They had an abandoned movie theater on their premises, and we were sitting inside on the carpet floor. Fergie had a bunch of sheets of paper around her and started writing, and I got the guitar and sat on the floor. And then a few minutes later, she hands me what she had written, and I read it, and it's:
  
  The smell of your skin still lingers on me
  Now you're probably on your flight back to your hometown
  Fairy tales don't always have a happy ending, do they?
  And I foresee the dark if I stay
  
  I was blown away by these words. I had chills.
  
  And then I played a few bits on the guitar, and I said, 'Can you sing it over that?' And she came up with this very unorthodox but beautiful melody.
  
  The verse of 'Big Girls Don't Cry' is really strange. It's not your typical professionally-written melody. It's just a weird melody, but it works, and it has so much emotion. So after that worked, I presented some pop chords on the guitar and hummed a melody, and the words were just pouring out of her: 'I hope you know that this has nothing to do with you.'
  
  And then, as we had finished the chorus, there was nothing memorable, nothing to latch onto. I felt it really needed a hook, something that people can remember. I had made it my task since I had moved to New York to really study the language, and I spent nights in the Barnes & Nobles just scouring through all the dictionaries and lexica writing down words and phrases. And one of the phrases I had written down was 'Big Girls Don't Cry.' So I looked at my clipboard and I saw the phrase 'Big Girls Don't Cry,' and suggested it to Fergie. She thought, oh, 'It's time to be a big girl now, and big girls don't cry.' That sealed the deal. We were like, 'Wow, we have a chorus. It's amazing.'
  
  Then I went to the little next corner room where there was a little recording setup, and started putting down the guitar and a little groove. She knocked on the door and said, 'Toby, I wrote the second verse.' Then I recorded her on the verses and the chorus. And for the bridge, I had put a few chords together and presented those to her, and then she just freestyled over these bridge chords. It just flowed out of her so organically. She was so inspired and so in the moment, and it was so authentic. For a songwriter, this is so nice if an artist doesn't question anything and it just flows out. It's raw and it's honest, and it emotes. It is real.
  
  I have to give Fergie a lot of credit for the words in 'Big Girls Don't Cry.' I steered it a little bit and I came up with the title, but a lot of the lyric is really her personal suffering and story."
• On iTunes, "Big Girls Don't Cry" was the most-downloaded song of 2007. Gwen Stefani's "The Sweet Escape " was second, and "Hey There Delilah" by Plain White T's was third.
  
  At the time, downloading was still very popular. Over the next few years more listeners turned to streaming.
• There's another famous song with the same title that was released in 1962, but that one is very different and from a male vocal group, The Four Seasons. In that falsetto-filled oldie, a guy tries to make a point by threatening to break up with his girl, but she simply leaves him, telling him, "Big girls don't cry." It was also a #1 hit.
• According to Nielsen BDS, which monitors airplay, "Big Girls Don't Cry" was the most-played song on American radio in 2007. Fergie was the top artist for digital sales that year with about 7.5 million. This song was #3 on the year-end digital sales chart, behind "Hey There Delilah" and "Crank That (Soulja Boy)."
• The accompanying music video for the song was directed by Anthony Mandler. The clip depicts a turbulent relationship between Fergie and her love interest, portrayed by actor Milo Ventimiglia (Gilmore Girls, This Is Us). Fergie didn't have much experience with love scenes, so she asked her co-star to take the lead. She recalled to Entertainment Tonight:
  
  "I just had to tell him, like, 'Please help me with this. I wanna just try to be in the moment, if you could help me. I don't wanna be thinking about where's the light and where's the camera because I'll just completely be hidden under hair.'"
  
  Fergie said Milo was a "great" teacher, and once she got into the swing of things on the day, she had "super fun."
• "Big Girls Don't Cry" trended around the 2025 Valentine's Day holiday on TikTok as users created videos of their pets covered in lipstick smudges set to the lyric, "I'll be your best friend and you'll be my Valentine."
• The song got a boost when Fergie performed it at the "Concert for Diana" on July 1 2007, a tribute to Diana, Princess of Wales, who died 10 years earlier. The concert took place at Wembley Stadium in London and also featured Elton John, Rod Stewart, Sarah Brightman and many others. The global TV audience was estimated at 500 million.
• Toby Gad recorded a new version of "Big Girls Don't Cry" with Victoria Justice that was released in 2023. This version is just her vocal with a string arrangement and Gad accompanying on piano.
  
  It was well received and convinced Gad to record more of the songs he wrote in the same style, resulting in his album Piano Diaries.
• Victoria Justice made a bachata version of this song in 2023 that trended on TikTok when she showed up in a video dancing to it.
• "Big Girls Don't Cry" almost wasn't included on The Dutchess. It was Jimmy Iovine (Fergie's label boss) along with Toby Gad's manager, David Sonnenberg, who convinced her to put it on the album.
  
  "Just before the album came out, I was looking at the online tracklisting and the song was not on there. I was panicking," Gad revealed to BANG Showbiz. "And then when the album came out, I saw that it was actually on the album, and I was so relieved. And then it ended up as a fourth single, and the world loved it."