Throwback Thursday: Leona Lewis, ‘Bleeding Love’

Welcome to Throwback Thursday, a weekly series showcasing an album, single, music video or performance of a bygone era and its personal and/or cultural significance.

My old roommate Ashlee absolutely loathed Leona Lewis‘ “Bleeding Love.” Who could blame her, really, that song was everywhere. It also didn’t help that I played that sucker on repeat every chance I got. From its infectious, rhythmic-based melody to Lewis’ absolutely intoxicating head voice, it was damn near irresistible. I was a senior in college when the song, a cut from her 2007 debut album Spirit, smashed, and it would quickly become one of these euphoric, life-defining backdrops. Even hearing it now, I’m whipped back to my youth ⎯⎯ a bright-eyed, disastrously naive 20-something who probably should have taken things a bit more seriously.

But I didn’t care. I was young. I was free, and responsibility was just a passing fancy. That final year of my studies seemed to drag on forever and ever. “Closed off from love, I didn’t need the pain / Once or twice was enough, but it was all in vain / Time starts to pass, before you know it, you’re frozen,” Lewis chirps on the opening stanza, staging a story of qualm-filled romance, as she grapples with close friends trying “to fill me with doubt,” she later confesses. The relationship might not be completely healthy, but Lewis is so love-struck she wears her battle scars proudly and unapologetically.

“Nothing’s greater, than the rush that comes with your embrace / And in this world of loneliness, I see your face,” she remarks in the second verse, compiling the mounting feelings rising within her. “Yet everyone around me, thinks that I’m going crazy, maybe, maybe / But I don’t care what they say / I’m in love with you / They try to pull me away, but they don’t know the truth / My heart’s crippled by the vein, that I keep on closing…”

Then, the hook crashes in like a wrecking ball. “You cut me open and I / Keep bleeding, keep, keep bleeding love
I keep bleeding, I keep, keep bleeding love.” It sticks to your brain. Your eardrums swell. Your lips mouth along, whether intentionally or not. Songwriters Jesse McCartney and Ryan Tedder struck platinum over and over and over again with “Bleeding Love,” embellished with a voice so angelic that it’s hard to imagine anyone but Lewis shooting this to the stratosphere.

Fun fact: the song was originally intended for McCartney’s Departure album, but his label hated it. After Lewis’ triumphant win on The X-Factor, judge and pop mogul Simon Cowell began the hunt for songs to place on her debut record. Hearing this, Tedder rearranged the song and pitched it to Cowell. And the rest is history. Lewis’ rendition soared from country to country, shattering records and blossoming into one of the most ubiquitous hits of the mid-00s.

Sure, we live in a world where Lewis has never been able to return to such a dizzying height, but her name (and legacy) is cemented in the pop pantheon.