Would KT Tunstall like to be wearing Prada again?
That, as they say in the film, is not a question.
In 2006, The Devil Wears Prada featured “Suddenly I See,” from the British singer-songwriter’s 2004 debut album Eye to the Telescope, as the soundtrack to its opening credits. That plum placement turned the upbeat pop track into a No. 30 hit on the Billboard Hot 100.
“That was the universe shifter,” Tunstall tells Billboard now. “I still love the film. If it ever comes on, I can’t stop watching it. The really extraordinary thing about it was my manager at the time said, ‘Enjoy this — it probably won’t happen again,’ where they used the whole song, unedited, without any dialogue over the top of it. So it was basically a music video with Meryl Streep and Anne Hathaway, which was just crazy. It’s like the sound of the movie, and that was really my golden ticket to the rest of the world.”
The Devil Wears Prada 2, meanwhile, is in production for a planned spring 2026 release, and Tunstall says she’d certainly like a chance to see if lightning can strike twice. However, she adds, the filmmakers “haven’t been in touch. I would love to pitch them a follow-up, so my brain is crunching at the moment because it would be so fun to send them another song. They might not use it, but it’s a fun thing to pitch for.”
An executive with the film tells Billboard that the Prada team is “in the very early stages” of making those decisions while the movie is being shot, and cannot yet share any information.
Tunstall adds that she had “no idea” what “Suddenly I See” could become when she recorded it. “These guys (at the record company) all say that they knew; they didn’t f–king know,” she says. “They knew it was catchy. I think they knew it had potential to be popular, but I don’t think they knew what that potential really was. We did okay with the first two singles, and this was like saving the poppiest thing for last. And then we got The Devil Wears Prada.”
All of this comes as Tunstall is about to celebrate Eye to the Telescope‘s 20th anniversary — it was first released during December 2004 and then re-released the following month with an altered track sequence. The 20th anniversary edition, due out Oct. 31 via BMG, adds three new tracks packaged as The Stargazer EP — most interestingly including the actual song “Eye to the Telescope,” which was not part of the original release.
“I had decided on the name for the album because my dad was a physicist, and he used to take me and my brothers to the observatory,” Tunstall explains. “The telescope used to flip my head open at a very young age, looking at the universe. So once I named the record I set about writing a title track. What I was coming up with was this very tender, gentle, balladic piece of music, and I just felt like with your first record, if you’re going to do a title track, it needs to be a banger — or so I thought at the time. So I just abandoned it after one verse and a chorus.
“Then when we came around to this (re-release) we were talking about what we could put on it, and BMG said, ‘Why don’t you finish that song?’ It was a really strange experience of trying to write something that felt cohesive from a 20-years-ago version of myself; I wrote a brand new intro and stayed true to the verse and chorus, then I wrote a completely new bridge with this wonderful flutist, Shabaka. There’s a beautiful string arrangement by David Davidson, who also worked on the original record, and Martin Terefe, who’s my oldest collaborator, produced, so that was awesome. I’m just thrilled with it. “
Stargazer also includes the outtake “Cancerian,” with a new vocal by Tunstall, and “Anything At All,” which she also felt was “too slow” for Eye to the Telescope and considered for other albums. “It just never has found its home until now,” Tunstall says. “It’s very interesting because it’s my original vocal; I’m actually singing backing vocals to myself on it, which was wild in the studio, listening to a younger version of myself and being the backup singer for that person.”
“I think it still sounds fresh,” she says of the album. “I don’t listen to it and go, ‘Wow, that sounds so 2000s…’ It really doesn’t. It sounds like musicians in a room, making music. I was very inspired by old Alan Lomax blues recordings at that time, so it has that timeless quality to it.” However, she does remember that she had to compromise her desire for a “raw” album during the post-production process.
“The label sent the record off to be mixed,” she explains, “and I didn’t know the artist should really be part of that process. So when it came back I felt like it had just been attacked with a hot iron. It felt so tamed to me…but the sweetening they did to it was probably what made it go on to sell a squidilliion copies. My garage version wouldn’t have hit in the same way. It was really tough at the time…which is crazy ’cause when I listen to it now I’m like, ‘It’s so raw! How could it be more raw?!’”
Tunstall has released six more studio albums since Telescope. Her latest outing is 2023’s Face to Face, a collaborative effort with Suzi Quatro. She’s mostly been immersed in musical theater, penning the music for Clueless, the Hit Musical — a revised edition of the stage adaptation of the 1995 film — and is working with comic Craig Ferguson on a rendering of his 2000 film Saving Grace. Tunstall says the idea of a musical built around her own songs has “definitely crossed my mind.”
“I think what I’ve learned is that the script, the book, is so important,” she says. “The music is your meat but the book is the skeleton, and if you don’t have a strong skeleton the meat’s just on its own, lying in a pile on the floor. You have to have this fantastic structure to hang the music on to actually make it really meaningful from song to song. My songs are very storyteller songs, so I feel like they’re made for (the theater), but I need to find a really phenomenal writer to work with to get a great story. I would love to do that, though.”
