Songfacts®:

• Moby has revealed that this song was inspired by a reality TV show he watched where celebrities were having a meaningless conversation around the breakfast table. He did not say which TV show, but the song seems to be a commentary on the phony nature of many celebrities and so-called "Reality" TV. >>

  Suggestion credit:
  Lauren - Hobart, Australia
• Moby on the tune's double meaning: "'Beautiful' is, on one hand, a simple and devious love song. On the other hand it's also about celebrity couples being simple and self-congratulatory."
• This was the album's fifth single. In the US, it peaked at #5 on the Adult Alternative Songs chart.
• The alt-rock-influenced Hotel came after Play (1999) and 18, a pair of electronic albums that propelled Moby to pop stardom. His newfound fame shifted his focus to making music that sells. He explained in a 2011 interview with The Arts Desk: "Most of my life my interest in making music was for the love of music, then after the success of Play I had a brief period when I really liked being a public figure. On Hotel I was almost more focused on the fame aspect. I wanted to produce an album that had the potential to be commercially successful. It's the only time in my life I've ever done that. I recorded it in a big studio with a really successful engineer [Brian Sperber] and ended up with a very slick, polished anodyne record that I just don't like very much. Some of the songs are nice but I'm disappointed I made such a conventional generic record."
• This was included on the soundtrack to the 2006 movie The Devil Wears Prada.
• Unlike his previous albums, Hotel doesn't feature any vocal samples. The choice came down to practicality rather than artistry. Moby told Shakenstir: "The truth is, I was using different software on my computer and the sampling section of this software is really hard to use, so it was me just being lazy. It was just a lot more satisfying and more fun to make music without samples, primarily because the sampling software was such a pain in the ass to use. I should really think of a better reason, but that's the truth of why it didn't have as many samples."