How KT Tunstall’s ‘Suddenly I See’ Became The Devil Wears Prada’s Perfect Opening Song

The first thing you see in The Devil Wears Prada is Andy Sachs (Anne Hathaway) wiping her steamy bathroom mirror and brushing her teeth before her job interview at Runway. But the first thing you hear is “Suddenly I See” by KT Tunstall. The 2000s pop-rock hit plays over a montage of Andy getting ready, juxtaposed with the model-like editors of Runway slipping into their designer clothes and hailing cabs, showing just how out of place she is before she even enters the building.

That opening sequence, like many things from the beloved movie, has become iconic since it first hit screens in 2006. And “Suddenly I See” has become forever associated with the film’s legacy. That’s still true 20 years later, as fans set their own getting-ready videos to the song on social media—it has appeared in 1.1 million TikToks to date, according to the platform. In the past year, it earned nearly 117 million streams on Spotify, with Gen Z being responsible for more than half of them.

“It’s just a thrill,” Tunstall says of the song’s lasting allure today, on Zoom from Nevada in between shows. “All of a sudden, one of your songs gets chosen to be elevated into Hollywood. And not only that, but it’s the opening of now a complete cult classic.”

Two decades on, it’s hard to imagine any other tune in that montage—it was such a perfect fit. “It has that great opening energetic instrumental that perks you up right away and launches you right into the film,” The Devil Wears Prada music supervisor Julia Michels says. “It then explodes with energy on the chorus, almost like an anthem. And of course, the lyrics feel like it was written for the movie and could not have been more on-point for the storytelling.”

With lines like “You can see she’s a beautiful girl” and “Suddenly I see / This is what I wanna be,” it’s like Andy wrote the track herself, but with Tunstall’s cool yet gritty voice. “From the start, the opening song really set the tone for a joyful movie about a young woman discovering herself through work in a demanding environment,” The Devil Wears Prada director David Frankel says. Here’s how it came to be.

Writing the Song

Tunstall did not write “Suddenly I See” specifically for the movie; she wrote it for her debut album, Eye to the Telescope (the same one that features “Black Horse & the Cherry Tree”), which was released in 2005. She already had a collection of songs for the record, but her label told her that it needed more singles, to her frustration.

Up one night at 2 A.M., the Scottish singer-songwriter found inspiration in the photo of Patti Smith on the cover of her album Horses, captured by Robert Mapplethorpe. Tunstall seemed to look at the image for answers, reflecting on her own struggles as an artist. (She finally signed a record deal at age 29, after spending most of her twenties chasing her big break.)

“I looked at the picture and I remember just thinking, I just feel like I’m trying endlessly. I’m just trying and grasping and failing and trying, trying, trying,” Tunstall, now 50, says. “And Patti Smith in this photograph looks like she’s just being. She’s just in the moment; she knows who she is. There’s a kind of defiance in her stare at me going, ‘Who the fuck are you? Why don’t you know who you are yet? Why are you still trying so hard?’”

In that moment, Tunstall realized: “It doesn’t matter if you’re not making tons of money or if people aren’t coming to your shows. I’m still a musician. I’m still a songwriter. And that’s when I wrote that song and it changed my life.” She was also inspired by Smith’s makeup-free appearance, and “that you can see someone’s history in their face.” Hence, the opening lyric, “her face is a map of the world.”

It all came together quickly. “I’m in my room, and it’s 2 in the morning, and it’s dark, and I’m just there with a guitar, and I write the song, and it takes half an hour, and I go to bed,” she says.

Shooting the Montage

Anne Hathaway in the opening scene of The Devil Wears Prada.

Meanwhile, the Devil Wears Prada script (written by Aline Brosh McKenna and Lauren Weisberger) “always called for a sequence that contrasted Andy getting ready for her job interview…with a number of ‘clackers’ heading to work,” Frankel says. (For the uninitiated, the “clackers” are what Andy calls the Runway staffers who “clack” around in their high heels.)

Though the montage appears at the beginning of the movie, Frankel recalls filming those scenes “fairly late in the shoot, since [Andy’s] apartment was a set onstage and we shot all the exterior and location work first.” Hathaway was down to experiment. “Annie was always game to try anything. It might’ve been her idea to be brushing her teeth in the mirror when we first see her,” he adds.

The montage, edited by Mark Livolsi, continued to expand as the team worked on it. “We set up a ‘clacker’ unit run by the producer who captured some of the shots,” Frankel remembers. They even filmed the insert of a woman counting almonds for breakfast in his brother’s apartment, “long after we wrapped principal photography.”

Soundtracking the Scene

“This main title sequence that David directed and cut together had ‘iconic’ written all over it; we just had to find the right music,” Michels explains. It was a “tough” search…until she heard Tunstall.

“I remember exactly where I was on Venice Boulevard when I heard ‘Suddenly I See’ for the first time,” Michels adds. “I remember the intersection where I was stopped when I put in an advance of KT Tunstall’s upcoming album into my CD player in my car and thought, Oh my God, this is it. I must have overnighted the CD to David Frankel as we were editing in New York and I live in L.A. After he heard it and cut it in, he called me and said, ‘Yes, this is it!’”

Tunstall got the news on a phone call from her manager, but she didn’t think much about it at the time. “You don’t know what a film’s going to do before it comes out. You have no idea,” she tells me. “I was like, ‘It’s a fashion movie? I don’t feel like I’m super fashion, but never mind.’”

She was on tour when The Devil Wears Prada premiered in June 2006. During a day off, she and her bandmates checked out the film at a local theater. “We sat down and the movie opened, and all the guys in my band just jumped up, and they’re like, ‘Woo!’ going crazy,” she says of seeing her song in the film for the first time. “And then 10 minutes into the movie, they were like, ‘We’re leaving.’ This is the truth.”

Tunstall, however, was stunned. “I remember sitting there with my popcorn just going, ‘What is happening right now? This is the coolest thing ever.’” (Her favorite look from the opening montage, by the way? “The underwear,” she says with a laugh.)

To this day, she’s still impressed that her song plays out in full without being edited or interrupted, which rarely happens. “They literally used the whole song, and there was no dialogue over the top of it,” she says. “It was like a music video with Anne Hathaway.”

The Impact

KT Tunstall performs onstage at the Brit Awards in 2006.

“Suddenly I See” took on new life after The Devil Wears Prada. “It’s like this huge aspirational anthem that I never ever intended,” Tunstall says. But she soon understood that anyone with a dream could relate to the line “this is what I want to be.”

The song reached No. 21 on the Billboard Hot 100. She realized momentum was building quickly when she was flown out to Japan for a 10-page Rolling Stone Japan spread after the film debuted. “They thought that I was like some fashion princess pop singer,” she says.

Tunstall was already making waves for her single “Black Horse & the Cherry Tree,” which she debuted on a (last-minute) live TV appearance on Later… with Jools Holland, and got more traction when Katharine McPhee sang it on American Idol. “Suddenly I See” marked “part two of that impact,” she says. “It just meant I was big in America. I toured the whole country. I was playing to 5,000, 6,000 people and it was the absolute dream. It was the dream come true. I couldn’t believe it.”

Looking back today, Tunstall is grateful that the song continues to resonate with people.

“I’ve just turned 50 and just seeing the album turn 20, and then seeing a lot of musicians who put in just as much work as I did and they haven’t had this kind of [full-circle moment] where their songs are still being played, they’re still getting sung at karaoke, they’re still getting put into music and into TV and film….It makes me incredibly grateful that I have these songs that I can pretty much step off a plane anywhere in the world and people know the words. I just feel like those are like gifts from above that you get these songs that hit at the right time, the right vibe, that they spread like wildfire.”

The same goes for The Devil Wears Prada’s opening montage. “It’s thrilling to know that the opening is still a pleasant trigger to release warm feelings about all the characters in the movie,” Frankel says. “You can’t hear the song anywhere without picturing Andy Sachs making her way through a forest of glamazons to the halls of Runway magazine.”

Adds Michels, “I think we captured lightning in a bottle. And I love that the fans still talk about this scene.” She and Tunstall remain good friends, too. “I feel very grateful for being a part of this iconic movie.”

As Tunstall puts it, “We changed each other’s lives.”

Making the Sequel(s)

KT Tunstall today.

Tunstall did pitch a song for The Devil Wears Prada 2, which hits theaters today. “When I met up with Julia Michels, I was just like, ‘I’m just going to pitch you,’” she recalls. It turns out she wrote a sequel, too.

“I always felt like it would be so cool to write a sequel to ‘Suddenly I See,’” Tunstall says. “Like, ‘Did it work? Did you get where you wanted to be? Did you become it and is it everything you wished? Was it overhyped? Now that you got there, what next?’ The [second] film coming out just really prompted me to write this follow-up song, and ultimately it didn’t work for the film. It’s pretty rock and roll what I wrote. And I think the film is super slick.”

She still plans to release the song, called “Look at Me Now,” one day, but there’s no date yet. Tunstall teases it’s about “older female confidence.” She explains, “You have your boundaries in place so you’re not going to get treated a certain way and you’re not going to take a level of other people’s standards under your own.” (Kind of like what Andy learns at the end of the first film.) “And if people are like, ‘Why didn’t they use this song [in the new movie]?’ that’s fine with me,” she says, smiling.

Tunstall has other projects to be excited about too: She composed the music for Clueless: The Hit Musical, which is on the West End and will go on tour soon. She’s working on a 10-year project called “100 Years, 100 Women,” featuring covers of songs by women from the 1920s to the 2020s. And she’s still performing around the world, including a tour with Brandi Carlile in Europe and the U.K. this fall. For those of us who can’t catch her on the road, we’ll happily relisten to “Suddenly I See,” imagining ourselves in a movie montage like we have since we were girls.