P!nk – Who Knew

I’m Not Dead, 2006: Conway room, Max Martin and Dr. Luke, a grief hook

Who Knew is track two’s radio face on P!nk’s fourth studio album, I’m Not Dead, released in April 2006 on LaFace. Alecia Moore wrote the song with Max Martin and Lukasz “Dr. Luke” Gottwald; the pair also produced it at Conway Recording Studios in Hollywood. LaFace serviced it to radio on 8 May 2006 as the album’s second single after Stupid Girls. The album cut runs about 3:28: a mid-tempo pop arrangement, acoustic guitar under the verses, and a chorus built for arenas.

The lyric addresses a friend who is gone. Moore has described the song as grief for someone she lost to addiction and time, not a generic breakup. The opening lines (“You took my hand / You showed me how”) set a promise that the chorus then undercuts with “Who knew”. Martin and Gottwald keep the drums clean and the vocal dry enough that the words stay readable. There is no rap verse, no guest feature: just Moore’s voice and a pop structure that leaves the emotional weight on the hook.

The video, directed by the team Dragon (Samuel Bayer, Robert Hales, Brian Lazzaro), was shot in Los Angeles in mid-April 2006. It intercuts fairground scenes with a young couple pulled apart by drugs while P!nk performs on the grounds. First-wave US chart action was modest; after U + Ur Hand broke bigger, LaFace re-promoted Who Knew in 2007 and it peaked at number 9 on the Billboard Hot 100. In the UK it reached number 5. Adult pop radio held it longer than the first single cycle suggested.