Who the hell is Delilah?

There's something in the gentle strains of Hey There Delilah that's so earnest, so honest, listeners wonder: Is this Plain White T's song about a real girl?

Delilah DiCrescenzo, a 24-year-old Olympic hopeful, is fact. But the song's relationship between a New York college student and a guitar player a thousand miles away, well, that part is completely made up.

"There was never anything between us," admits Tom Higgenson, 28, lead singer for the Chicago-based quintet. "It was kind of funny — kind of sad, actually. The story of my life."

Released in 2005, Delilah has become a surprise summer hit, already spawning a profane radio-show parody. The song's popularity live got it added to the band's 2007 major-label debut album, Every Second Counts. It's currently in the top five of Billboard's Hot 100 and iTunes' Top Songs charts. The band appears on MTV's TRL today and has a recurring role in ABC Family's upcoming Greek.

A friend introduced Higgenson to his muse five years ago.

"I thought she was the most beautiful girl I had ever seen," he says. "I told her, 'I have a song about you already.' Obviously, there was no song. But I thought it was smooth."

He waited a year to write the song. Now, it's inescapable.

"When I'm at the gym, it's playing; when I'm at the pool, it's playing," says DiCrescenzo, a Columbia University graduate and a steeplechase runner who's training for next year's Olympic trials. "Part of me wants to scream at the top of my lungs that it's about me. Another part of me wants to cower and say it's not."

DiCrescenzo rebuffed his advances. "I wasn't interested. I was dating somebody." But the two kept in touch by e-mail.

"Because I wasn't with Delilah, I had to imagine, 'If I was with this girl, what would I want to tell her?' " he says.

DiCrescenzo considered Higgenson's promises of a song so much playful flirting until he brought her a disc in late 2004.

"It was so beautifully written," she says. "There was pressure to live up to this ideal. I didn't know how to be polite but, you know, ditch him."

Years later, Higgenson is OK with that. "If we had lived happily ever after, then what would my next song be about?"


Oh.. So that was Delilah huh. :)

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