Songfacts®:

• This love song is about finding the person you were meant to be with and have been waiting for all your life. The hook line, "I knew I loved you before I met you," is very Hallmark, and many listeners found it deeply moving. The song became very popular at weddings.
• "I Knew I Loved You" sent four weeks at #1 in America, including all of February 2000. It was unseated on March 4 by another wedding favorite: "Amazed" by Lonestar.
• This song almost didn't make it onto the Affirmation album. When Darren Hayes and Daniel Jones of Savage Garden presented their songs for the album to their record producers, they were told that the album wouldn't be as big a hit as their debut album if they didn't have a "Truly Madly Deeply" on it. So Darren and Daniel went and wrote this song. It was a painful task for Darren, who was going through a divorce at the time. >>

  Suggestion credit:
  Ceres - Concord, NH
• Kirsten Dunst starred in the video. Dunst's career took off a few years later with big roles in the Spider-Man movies and in Marie Antoinette.
• Hayes and Jones asked Walter Afanasieff to produce the album after they worked with him on "The Animal Song" for the movie The Other Sister. Afanasieff, who frequently worked with Mariah Carey in the early '90s, was surprised at how fast the duo came up with "I Knew I Loved You," especially since Hayes was reluctant to write another love ballad. He told Fred Bronson, author of The Billboard Book Of #1 Hits, how the singer reacted to the unwelcome songwriting assignment: "Darren is a rebel. He likes to fight the establishment. So it was really difficult. I eased it into the conversation. And it was like a dare. He got a look in his eyes. I have this little writing room upstairs in my guest house where they were living. Darren looked over at Daniel and said, 'They want a 'Truly Madly Deeply'? Alright, I'll give them one.' Ten minutes later they came back downstairs and said, 'We did it. It's a song called 'I Knew I Loved You.'"
• Hayes and Jones didn't even spend the whole 10 minutes on this song. They came up with ideas for a few others, but thought they were too sappy to work. Hayes was ready to give up but Jones came up with chords that inspired him. "And this song came out of me and it really healed my broken heart," Hayes told Bronson. "It's such an innocent song and my way of relating to love at that time was to think about idealism and maybe the future."
  
  But Hayes recalled the songwriting session being a bit longer than Afanasieff remembered, telling Official Charts the song was written in "about 40 minutes out of spite towards the record company."
• Hayes sang this at Afanasieff's wedding in 2001.
• Affirmation was Savage Garden's second and final studio album, with this single being their last chart-topper. The duo officially split in 2001, with Hayes embarking on a solo career and Jones launching his own production company and recording studio. The album peaked at #6 in the US, where it also sold 3 million copies.
• This was used on the TV series Murder In Suburbia in the 2005 episode "The Wedding."
• The country singer Daryle Singletary recorded a popular version for his 2000 album, Now And Again.