These posts are about the songs that just barely failed to cross the key line of chart success, entering the Billboard Top 40. Every song featured in this series peaked at number 41.

At the 2010 CMT Music Awards, held at Nashville’s Bridgestone Arena, Taylor Swift was seated in the front row. Including a collaboration with Kellie Pickler, Swift was competing in three categories, but spent the evening clapping for others (Miranda Lambert bested her twice). Swift already had a decent collection of trophies by that point, so the shut out likely didn’t bother her much. Besides, she got a song out of the night, so it wasn’t a total loss.

Also in the front row, severals seats and at least one aisle away, sat John Mayer. In the parlance of celebrity couplings, Swift and Mayer had been an item. (She was still a teenager at the time, and Mayer was in his early thirties), but they’d broken up by this particular entertainment event. Awkwardness ensued.

“Afterward, I just felt so empty, like we were both fighting this silent war of pretending we didn’t care that the other was there,” Swift told MTV News. “And I went home, and I wrote this song about it. And at that point, I had this gut feeling, and I knew the album was finished.”

The album in question was Speak Now, Swift’s third full length release, and the song that she wrote in the glum afterglow of the awards show was “The Story of Us,” which slotted in nicely against other material clearly inspired by the bad romance with Mayer. Like its predecessors, Speak Now was a huge hit for Swift, topping the Billboard album chart and yielding five Top 40 hits. “The Story of Us,” released as the fourth single from the album, was the slight exception. Unlike all the other singles from the album, “The Story of Us” peaked at #41.

Also, Swift was better off without Mayer anyway.

Other entries in this series can be found by clicking on the “Top 40 Smash Near Misses” tag.