The 2010s File Feature
This Is Me
"This Is Me": Keala Settle, The Greatest Showman, and a Showstopper That Conquered the Charts "This Is Me" emerged from the biographical musical film The Gre…
01 The Story
"This Is Me": Keala Settle, The Greatest Showman, and a Showstopper That Conquered the Charts
"This Is Me" emerged from the biographical musical film The Greatest Showman as the project's emotional and commercial centerpiece, eventually transcending its origins as a movie soundtrack number to become one of the most enduring anthems of self-acceptance of the 2010s. Written by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, the songwriting team also responsible for "City of Stars" and "Audition" from La La Land, the track was performed in the film by actress and singer Keala Settle, whose performance became one of the most discussed moments in the film's promotional rollout and theatrical release.
The Greatest Showman told a fictionalized account of the life of P.T. Barnum, the American showman and circus entrepreneur played by Hugh Jackman. The film was directed by Michael Gracey and opened in the United States on December 20, 2017, after a promotional campaign that included multiple theatrical readings of the script and a celebrated screening of the "This Is Me" sequence for executives that reportedly moved several to tears. The film was produced by Chernin Entertainment and distributed by 20th Century Fox.
Keala Settle, a Hawaiian-born Broadway veteran who had appeared in productions including Priscilla, Queen of the Desert and Waitress, was cast as the Bearded Lady, one of Barnum's performers. Her casting was not without personal difficulty: a widely circulated account of the film's production described Settle initially being deeply reluctant to perform the song in its full, physically exposed style, and the emotional breakthrough captured in a rehearsal video became a viral phenomenon that predated the film's release and heightened anticipation for the song itself.
On the Billboard Hot 100, "This Is Me" debuted at number 83 on the chart dated January 13, 2018, climbed to number 64 the following week, and reached its peak position of number 58 on the chart dated January 27, 2018. It remained on the Hot 100 for 14 weeks total, a chart run that reflected not just opening-weekend enthusiasm but sustained audience engagement over the film's theatrical life. The song performed particularly well on the Adult Contemporary and Adult Pop charts, where its melodic accessibility and emotional directness found a broad, cross-demographic audience.
The Academy Awards became the song's most prominent platform. "This Is Me" was nominated for Best Original Song at the 90th Academy Awards, held on March 4, 2018. Keala Settle performed the song live during the ceremony, delivering a performance that was reviewed as one of the broadcast's highlights. The song ultimately lost the Oscar to "Remember Me" from Coco, but the nomination and televised performance gave the track a second surge of mainstream attention and introduced it to viewers who had not seen the film.
The Golden Globe Awards were more generous. "This Is Me" won the Golden Globe for Best Original Song at the 75th Golden Globe Awards on January 7, 2018, with Settle performing at the ceremony. That win preceded the Grammy nomination cycle and added further prestige to the song's trophy case during the awards season. The Greatest Showman soundtrack album was also commercially extraordinary: it spent 48 weeks at number one on the UK Albums Chart, an unprecedented run for a movie soundtrack, and performed strongly across multiple international markets.
Pasek and Paul, who wrote "This Is Me" alongside producer Greg Wells, were already Academy Award winners when the song was released, having won the previous year for "City of Stars." Their approach to the song followed their established practice of grounding emotional anthems in specific dramatic context while writing lyrics universal enough to resonate outside that context. The song's structure, a verse establishing vulnerability followed by a chorus of defiant self-proclamation, was a deliberately theatrical construction designed to work both as a story beat within the film and as a standalone emotional experience.
Producer Greg Wells, a Canadian-born record producer and musician who had previously worked with Adele, Katy Perry, and Twenty One Pilots, created the song's swelling, orchestral arrangement. The production layered live orchestral elements, choral vocals, and contemporary pop production techniques to create a sound that felt simultaneously classic and current. The opening section of the track uses deliberate rhythmic and dynamic restraint before the full arrangement explodes, a structural choice that mirrors the emotional arc of defiance rising from suppression.
The YouTube performance of "This Is Me" was substantial, with the official video accumulating approximately 140 million views, aided by the film's massive promotional apparatus, the viral rehearsal footage, and the sustained attention from the awards season. The video itself, edited from the film sequence, became the visual that most audiences associated with the song, given the power of Settle's physical performance and the staging of the ensemble moment.
The song's commercial appeal was amplified by the broader success of The Greatest Showman as a theatrical phenomenon. The film opened to mixed critical reviews but found an audience that returned repeatedly, generating strong legs at the box office and pushing the soundtrack album to extraordinary streaming and sales performance. The Greatest Showman: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 in January 2018 and returned to the top position multiple times over subsequent months as the film's audience grew.
Legacy and Continued Relevance
Following the film's theatrical run, "This Is Me" developed a life as an inspirational anthem used in school productions, graduation ceremonies, and motivational contexts far removed from its film origins. The song's explicit themes of accepting difference and refusing shame resonated particularly with audiences navigating experiences of social exclusion, making it a regular selection for anti-bullying campaigns and LGBTQ+ advocacy events.
Keala Settle released her own studio version of the song independent of the film, and she performed it on numerous television programs and concert stages in the years following the film's release. Her association with the song became a defining element of her professional identity, though she has also continued to work in theater and on other recordings.
The film itself was released on home video and streaming platforms, where it found additional audiences and extended the song's reach further into the cultural conversation. By any measure, "This Is Me" represented a rare achievement: a deeply specific dramatic song that successfully converted its specificity into something universal, charting, winning awards, and outlasting the theatrical run of the film that produced it.
02 Song Meaning
Shame, Pride, and the Architecture of Radical Self-Acceptance in "This Is Me"
"This Is Me" is structured around one of the oldest dramatic movements in storytelling: the journey from concealment to declaration. Its lyrics trace an emotional progression from the experience of being marked as different and taught to hide that difference, to the moment of refusing concealment and insisting on full visibility. The song's power derives from naming that journey explicitly rather than leaving it in metaphor, making it accessible to virtually any listener who has experienced social rejection, shame, or the demand to diminish themselves for the comfort of others.
Within the context of The Greatest Showman, the song is given to the Bearded Lady, a character whose physical difference makes her an outcast in the social world that surrounds P.T. Barnum's performers. She and the other performers have been welcomed into Barnum's world not despite their difference but because of it, and "This Is Me" functions as the moment when that welcome is internalized, when the characters stop experiencing their difference as a wound and begin experiencing it as an identity worth celebrating.
The theological and quasi-religious imagery in the song is deliberate and worth noting. References to scars, to brokenness, to being made whole, draw on a vocabulary of redemption that gives the song a spiritual register without committing to a specific doctrinal position. This broad spiritual language is part of why the song has been adopted so widely across different communities: it speaks to the experience of feeling damaged and seeking restoration without requiring the listener to arrive at that restoration through any particular path.
Benj Pasek and Justin Paul built the song's emotional architecture on contrast, placing the vulnerability of the verses in deliberate tension with the eruption of the chorus. The verses describe the accumulated damage of social exclusion in language that is specific and personal. The chorus responds to that damage not with explanation or argument but with a bare declaration of existence: this is who I am, full stop. The simplicity of that declaration is its rhetorical power. There is no negotiation in the chorus, no attempt to convince the listener that the singer deserves acceptance. The singer simply announces their presence.
The choral arrangement reinforces this thematically. When the full ensemble joins the vocal in the chorus, the song moves from the experience of isolated individual difference to something communal and collective. The "me" of the title expands to include multiple bodies and voices, suggesting that radical self-acceptance is not merely a private achievement but a shared practice that becomes possible when it is witnessed and affirmed by others.
The cultural context of 2017-2018 gave the song particular resonance. The period was marked by intensifying public conversations about identity, visibility, and the social structures that determine whose presence is welcomed and whose is managed. "This Is Me" arrived at a moment when enormous numbers of people were navigating questions about gender, race, disability, sexuality, and belonging, and the song's refusal to specify which type of difference it was addressing made it usable by all of these communities simultaneously.
The song's adoption by LGBTQ+ audiences was especially significant. The combination of theatrical register, explicit shame-to-pride narrative, and ensemble singing placed it in a tradition of queer anthems without the song being explicitly queer in its text. This ambiguity was a feature rather than an accident, allowing the song to function as a private signal to audiences for whom public identification carried risk while remaining broadly acceptable to mainstream audiences who might have resisted a more explicit framing.
Keala Settle's performance of the song contributed substantially to its meaning by grounding the abstract emotional narrative in the specificity of her physical presence and her publicly documented resistance to performing it. The viral rehearsal video, in which Settle can be seen working through her own fear and eventually breaking through it, created a metacommentary on the song's themes. Audiences were watching a performer confront the very shame the song was describing, which gave the filmed performance an emotional authenticity that studio-polished equivalents could not replicate.
The song's use in subsequent years for graduation ceremonies, memorial services, and anti-bullying campaigns represents the clearest evidence of how completely it escaped its original context. Songs achieve this kind of cultural adoption when they successfully identify an emotional experience that is simultaneously universal in its structure and specific enough in its language to feel genuinely personal. "This Is Me" accomplished both: the emotional movement from shame to pride is recognizable across enormous differences in life experience, while the lyrical specificity of feeling "broken" and "bruised" before finding one's own completeness speaks to something particular and felt.
The composition's theatrical ancestry also matters for understanding its cultural function. The song belongs to a tradition of Broadway show-stoppers designed to produce communal release, moments in which the audience's pent-up emotional investment in characters finds an outlet through a swelling, major-key musical declaration. When that tradition intersects with contemporary pop production and streaming distribution, the result is a song that carries the emotional impact of a theatrical event into domestic listening environments, which is part of why it continued to find new audiences long after the film's theatrical run ended.
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