Songfacts®:

• In this breezy country-pop tune, Faith Hill is in a state of romantic bliss after locking lips with her man. Faith could easily identify with the feeling. In 1996, she married fellow country singer Tim McGraw after their love affair quickly blossomed earlier that year when they toured together. In 1997, they released their first hit duet, "It's Your Love."
  
  "I hate cynical people who say their first kisses are nothing special," she said. "My first kiss with Tim was perfect, exactly as it should be. I love kissing."
• With her first two albums, Hill established herself as a country star, but with her third release, Faith, she wanted to venture into the pop market. The first single, "This Kiss," was a huge crossover success, peaking at #7 on the Hot 100 and holding the #1 spot on the Country chart for three consecutive weeks. The rest of the singles were also big hits on the Country chart, including the #1 ballad "Let Me Let Go."
• This was her first Top 10 hit on both the Hot 100 and the Adult Contemporary chart (where it peaked at #3).
• This was written by Beth Nielsen Chapman, Robin Lerner and Annie Roboff. The songwriters thought they were writing a straight-up pop song, which was initially a keyboard-based track, and had acts like Patti LaBelle, Brandy, or Britney Spears in mind to sing it. "The music to it was very pop, and we didn't even pitch it to country," Chapman told the Playing It By Ear podcast in 2021. "And then we thought, well, we'll pitch to The Judds, and we'll pitch it to Trisha Yearwood, and nobody heard it."
  
  Once they heard Faith was recording a new album, they stripped the song down and re-recorded it with steel guitars and "dressed it up in a different outfit." Said Chapman: "When you do that, you give the song a chance to be heard a different way, and then right away it was cut by Faith."
• The songwriting trio wrote the first verse and chorus pretty quickly, but they struggled to come up with the second verse, the one where Cinderella asks Snow White about how love gets so off course. At first Chapman came up with a line about Cleopatra being a snowflake, which Lerner and Roboff immediately vetoed. Chapman wasn't entirely serious, but she knew she was hitting close to the mark.
  
  "In my world, that's a clue. That's got something in it, 'cause it sang really good, 'Cleopatra was a snowflake.' But it didn't make any sense," she told the Sodajerker podcast in 2016. When Roboff insisted they weren't putting any Disney characters in the song, it finally clicked for Chapman. "And when she said Disney, I went, 'Cinderella. It's not Cleopatra, it's Cinderella. And it's not a snowflake, it's Snow White. And they're talking about love and they're like going, what's the deal here? Then all of the sudden, 'Cinderella said to Snow White, how does love get so off course?' And it becomes this conversation between two iconic girls talking about getting kissed, and it fit the song beautifully, and they were all on board at that point. They're like, 'Oh, what a great idea!' And I'm like, 'It wasn't my idea, it was Cleopatra's idea!' But you have to be willing to listen to Cleopatra when she comes through."
• Chapman, who also sang backing vocals on this, said her cut of the royalties put her son through college.
• Chapman and Roboff also wrote "Happy Girl," which was a #2 Country hit for Martina McBride in 1998. Lerner went on to write Tim McGraw's 2003 crossover hit "She's My Kind Of Rain."
• You'd be hard-pressed to find another hit that mentions centrifugal motion in the lyrics (although "centrifugal force" does show up in Sam Fender's 2018 track "Dead Boys"), let alone a country tune. Lerner talked about the multi-syllabic chorus in a 2008 LitPark interview, saying, "I guess one could say I'm best known for my 'unusual' lyrics. Songs like 'This Kiss' and 'She's My Kind of Rain' were a bit off the beaten path for country music at the time. 'It's centrifugal motion, it's perpetual bliss, it's that pivotal moment'... I don't think country music had ever seen that many syllables strung together like that in a country chorus before… We definitely started a trend. And in some hardcore country music people's minds, it wasn't necessarily a good trend.
  
  It was really a miracle that the song ever got on the radio at all. And, of course after that, there were lots of imitators. Martina McBride recorded a song straight after Faith, called 'I Love You' that tried to replicate what we had done in 'This Kiss.'"
• This was nominated for two Grammy Awards in 1999: Best Female Vocal Country Performance and Best Country Song. It lost in both categories to "You're Still the One" by Shania Twain.
• The colorful music video, directed by Steven Goldmann ("The Secret of Life"), is a CGI fantasy that features Hill swinging on a giant nectarine, dancing on a flower, and soaring across the sky on a butterfly. Hill was filmed in front of a green screen, and most of the images were added in post-production, except for the nectarine. That was actually crafted for her to swing on. In her CMT Video Bio, the singer said she outgrew her clothes for the shoot in mere days because she was pregnant with her second daughter, Maggie, at the time. "We had to do some tricks to work around that," she recalled.
  
  In April 1998, around four months before her due date, she performed the tune at the Academy of Country Music Awards among oversized flowers.
• This won the CMA Award for Music Video of the Year in 1998. The song was also nominated for Single of the Year, but lost to "Holes In The Floor Of Heaven" by Steve Wariner.
• This was used in the 1998 movie Practical Magic, starring Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman as witch sisters who are plagued by a curse that threatens their love lives.
• This was also used in the TV series Mr. Robot in the 2019 episode "410 Gone."
• In October 2003, the album was certified 6x Platinum by the RIAA for selling 6 million copies in the US.