Switchfoot’s breakout album The Beautiful Letdown turns 20 on Saturday.

Originally released on February 25, 2003, The Beautiful Letdown is now certified double-Platinum by the RIAA, and spawned the hit singles “Meant to Live” and “Dare You to Move.”

Speaking with ABC Audio, bassist Tim Foreman recalls when his brother, frontman Jon Foreman, first showed him the famed riff from “Meant to Live” on an acoustic guitar.

“‘But picture it on an electric guitar. It’s gonna be heavy!'” Tim recalls Jon telling him.

“I was, like, ‘Yeah, OK, I can kinda picture that,'” Tim laughs. “Then we hopped in the van and drove to [Los Angeles] for something, and we wrote the bridge on the way. By the time we got there, both of us kinda knew that we had something special.”

That something special has continued to stick for the members of Switchfoot, who’ve now performed “Meant to Live” and “Dare You to Move” countless times over the past two decades.

“I have friends that have had huge, successful songs that they wrote about some girl that they don’t really care about anymore, or they wrote about something…[that] doesn’t matter to them now,” Jon says. “I’m really thankful that both, pretty much almost all the songs people wanna hear from us are songs that truly mean something to us still.”

“You can’t pretend to be the same person, we’re all different people, we’re all different people from day-to-day,” he continues. “But I still connect with a lot of the lyrics and can find my way into the melody in a way that feels compelling.”

Switchfoot also told ABC Audio they have “big plans” to mark the anniversary. The group’s most recent release is their 2022 holiday compilation, this is our Christmas album.

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