Plain White T’s frontman Tom Higgenson wrote “Hey There Delilah” after meeting his dream girl in Chicago, and he told the Tribune it would be “super cool” to film a TV project inspired by the song here.
“I was talking to a buddy of mine just a couple weeks ago. You know, summer in Chicago is just the best. You can’t really beat it anywhere else, and we were talking about all those John Hughes movies, like from the ‘80s, and they’re all Chicago,” said Higgenson, who grew up in the Lombard area and now lives in Elmhurst.
“‘Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,’ ‘Sixteen Candles,’ it’s like all these movies are set in the suburbs of Chicago. And it’s just, there’s something magical about that area, so I think it would be really fun to at least be able to set a good chunk of this in Chicago. That’d be cool, pay a little homage to that John Hughes era of movies.”
The news broke last week that Higgenson and his collaborators are shopping a concept for TV that would capture the vibe and sentiment of “Delilah.” The Grammy-nominated hit dropped in 2006, and Higgenson said it was a long road to last week’s announcement.
The 39-year-old has always wanted to write a movie or a musical, and he was tapped to pen the “BFF” song for the “SpongeBob SquarePants” musical. During that experience, Higgenson connected with Lively McCabe Entertainment Co-President Michael Barra, who brainstormed ideas for the “Delilah” adaptation. Jeremy Desmon (“Pump Up the Volume”) is attached to write.
The project is in the “super early” stages, Higgenson said, but “we’ve got all of the ingredients there.” He said the network or outlet that picks up the pitch will get to determine its format — TV movie, miniseries, etc.
He said the lyrics will help form the narrative, which is being described as a “contemporary fairy tale expanding on the story within the song.” Higgenson describes how he longs for Chicago-area native Delilah DiCrescenzo while she is in New York City, but the lyrics don’t recount their life-changing early 2000s encounter.
Higgenson met his muse while she was on break from Columbia University. A mutual friend asked Higgenson if he wouldn’t mind if DiCrescenzo tagged along with them to a Lucky Boys Confusion show at the House of Blues.
“We go pick up Delilah, and she walks out of her house into the car, and I’m just kind of like, ‘Ohmigod’ — one of those like the ‘world stops’ moments. You know, cue the love song playing as she’s walking in slow motion,” Higgenson said. He said he lightly flirted with DiCrescenzo the rest of the night and told her he had a song about her. Eventually, he did.
Higgenson said he was in touch with DiCrescenzo — a professional-runner-turned-marketing-specialist who attended high school in suburban Burbank — last summer, when they exchanged nostalgic text messages around the 10th anniversary of “Delilah” reaching No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100.
“It’s funny because nothing ever really happened between her and I. I ended up taking her to the Grammys as my date, and it was super cool. It was fun, but I don’t know how compatible we actually would have been in real life, outside of the fantasy, the fairy tale of the song,” said Higgenson, who is a single dad to an 8-year-old son. DiCrescenzo did not return a Tribune request for comment.
“I think if she would want to be a part of (the TV project) somehow, that would be cool and that would be fun, but she’s not really a creative type, so I don’t know if she would even care to have much input,” Higgenson said.
The TV pitch comes as Higgenson’s band prepares to drop its new album, “Parallel Universe” — which Higgenson describes as “like Plain White T’s with a little bit of a face lift” — on Aug. 24. The T’s will perform at Reckless Records in Wicker Park that day as part of a cross-country tour.
Higgenson also recently started his own record label, Humans Were Here. He signed the acoustic pop band Fairview from the Addison area, “so, keeping it west suburbs.”
tswartz@tribpub.com
Twitter @tracyswartz
