Over and Over Again

Album: Unfinished Business (2015)
Charted: 8
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Songfacts®:

  • This heartfelt piano-led ballad was written by Nathan Sykes on his own. Released as a single, it became the former Wanted star's first solo UK Top 10 hit helped by a live performance on The X Factor on November 22, 2015.
  • The accompanying music video was directed by Frank Borin, who Nathan Sykes previously worked with when he filmed the visuals for The Wanted's "We Own the Night" and "Show Me Love (America)."

    The Notebook-inspired clip sees Nathan fall in love with a girl, played by model MaeMae Renfrow as we see their first date, first house and first child. Nathan said: "I've had the idea since the day I wrote the song so to see it come to life and now be able to share it with everyone is so exciting ... It's my favourite video I've ever been a part of making."
  • Nathan Sykes enlisted his former girlfriend Ariana Grande to sing on an updated version of the piano-centric ballad. The pair previously recorded together when they dueted on "Almost Is Never Enough" a track from Grande's 2013 album Yours Truly.

    Sykes told Billboard magazine how he ended up recruiting his old friend for the ballad. "I sat there listening to the song when it came on the radio in the UK, and I said, 'You know who'd sound great on this?' - it was just a really random thought - 'Ariana. She'd sound fantastic on this song,'" he said. "And obviously, we'd done 'Almost Is Never Enough' before, on her debut album Yours Truly, and that's where I met my executive producer Harmony Samuels. He's just fantastic. And that's who I wrote 'Over and Over Again' with.

    "So it's kind of come full-circle," Sykes concluded. "She was really up for it, and she went in and put down an amazing, just beautiful vocal."
  • Many of the tracks on Nathan Sykes' debut solo album are heartbreak songs but this one is different. "I sat there and said, 'I need to write a nice love ballad,' because all these songs are [about] breakups and near-relationships, like no one loves me," he told MTV News. "So I flew out to LA and I was like, 'Yes, I wrote a nice love song,' and it's really sweet. It made me feel a bit nauseous reading the lyrics, I was in a sappy mood."

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