Musicians Who Hooked Up After A Collaboration

Love is a delightful little prankster, liable to strike most anywhere at any time. (Perhaps that's why the concept of romance has been anthropomorphized as Cupid, an impish angel wielding a bow and a quiver of love-tipped arrows.) Love can strike "at first sight," or love can develop over time, or even between friends who've known each other a long time. Or, love can manifest between two extremely good-looking and talented people forced to spend hours upon hours together recording a song, filming a music video for the song, taking the song on the road, or hitting up talk shows to promote the song.

You know the kind of tune we're talking about. Whether emotionally overwrought or steamy, these tracks about attraction, love, romance, and affection become part of the culture — a predictable soundtrack at wedding receptions and school dances. Sometimes, music like this is so romantic that even the people who sang it can't help but fall in love with each other.

The closest thing we have to a royal couple in America, and perhaps a superior option at that, is Jay and Bey, the hustler-turned-king-of-hip-hop and one-time partial owner of the Brooklyn Nets, and Beyoncé, the most woke and artistically significant and innovative singer/video artist of her generation, respectively. Sure, there have been bumps along the way to world domination and creating future presidents Blue Ivy, Rumi, and Sir (as detailed on both Jay-Z's 4:44 and Beyoncé's Lemonade), but the two cultural icons have remained together for more than 15 years. 

The pair met in the late '90s, when Beyoncé was in Destiny's Child and Jay-Z was all about "Big Pimpin,'" but the artists didn't start "to try to date each other," as Jay-Z told Vanity Fair, until 2001, when they both appeared on the cover of the magazine's "Music Issue." 

The chemistry and mutual affection became undeniable with the release of the duet singles (and videos) "'03 Bonnie & Clyde" and "Crazy in Love." By that time, these two were definitely an item, but Beyoncé kept it a secret, heeding advice Oprah Winfrey once gave her: "Don't tell people who you're dating, but you can tell people who you're married to." 

The couple's first official public appearance together was at the 2004 MTV Video Music Awards.

Country music power couple Garth Brooks and Trisha Yearwood married in 2005, which was nearly 20 years after they first met, sang together, and subsequently started to fall in love. 

Before Brooks went on to become the second-best-selling act ever (really) and before Yearwood recorded the superior version of "How Do I Live," the two met and sang together in 1987 in a songwriter's attic recording studio to record a demo. (Yearwood was paid $10 for the session; Brooks got nothing.) 

"It's strange because I felt that feeling like when you just meet your wife, but I'd been married for 13 months," Brooks said on The Ellen DeGeneres Show (via Country Living). He was referring to his first wife, Sandy Dahl. Yearwood, who was married to musician Chris Latham at the time, later told CMT that she and Brooks "hit it off" that day. 

In 1989, Brooks employed Yearwood as the opening act on his tour, and they went on to record multiple songs together, including "Like We Never Had a Broken Heart" and "In Another's Eyes." In 2000, Brooks retired from music to spend time with his family, and then filed for divorce. Yearwood had just split from her second husband, and in 2002, the couple started appearing in public together before marrying three years later. And it all started with a cheap gig in '87.

If you're not familiar with country music and don't watch reality TV, then you only know Blake Shelton as that celebrity who looks like a guy you went to high school with that for some reason is on the cover of every magazine at the grocery store. That's because Shelton is basically a Kardashian of country music if you consider the way he hooks up and breaks up with such drama and scandal. 

Before his high-profile relationship with fellow The Voice judge Gwen Stefani, Shelton was married to fellow country music star Miranda Lambert, and the way they got together was straight out of a classic country song — both romantic and messy. 

In 2005, Lambert and Shelton performed together on a CMT special called 100 Greatest Duets in Concert, singing a rendition of the 1981 hit "You're the Reason God Made Oklahoma." It was hot, and it showed. 

"We had instant chemistry," Lambert later said of the performance. "Looking back on that, I was falling in love with her right there onstage," Shelton admitted on Lambert's Behind the Music episode. That was problematic, because Shelton was married at the time to his first wife, Kaynette Williams. In 2006, just a few months after that steamy duet, Shelton filed for divorce. He and Lambert got together soon thereafter. In 2011, they made it official ... and four years after that, they made it unofficial with a divorce.

The first bit of music that future pop superstar/ponytail model Ariana Grande made after she broke free of the Nickelodeon-shaped chains that bound her was the 2013 single "The Way." That song hit the top 10 — its success fueled by both Grande's powerful vocals and a guest spot by up-and-coming rapper Mac Miller. 

Grande was off and running with her career, but the relationship with Miller would still take a while to blossom. Three years later, after Grande's brief dalliance with Big Sean, and then a more-than-friendly performance of "The Way" at the 2016 Billboard Hot 100 Fest, Miller and Grande were spotted in public engaging in the wholesome activities that young lovers enjoy, such as hitting the tattoo parlor and attending the MTV Video Music Awards. 

Finally, in September 2016, Grande confirmed on television to America's best friend, Ellen DeGeneres, that she and Miller had a thing going on.

Oddly enough, around the same time that Ariana Grande was laying down the seeds of a future relationship with a musical partner, her future boyfriend, Big Sean, was doing the same thing. 

In 2013, the rapper best known for "Bounce Back" and for being tall met singer Jhené Aiko when they worked on "Beware" and "I'm Gonna Be." Aiko told BBC Radio's 1Xtra Breakfast Show with Dotty that Sean asked her out on a date to a basketball game, and she went, but only as a friend because she had a boyfriend at the time, and also because she "had never been courtside to a game and he's cool." Makes sense. 

Aiko was finally romantically available in 2017, right around when her divorce from producer Dot da Genius was finalized. That's about when she told Billboard that she and her old collaborator, Big Sean, had gotten together and, by the way, she was hopelessly in love.

Amy Grant and Vince Gill were both huge stars in their respective genres. Grant successfully jumped from a career in Christian pop to secular pop, churning out dentist office favorites such as "Baby, Baby." Gill was a huge mainstream country music star, with a high and emotive voice ranking him up there with colleagues such as Garth Brooks and George Strait. Grant and Gill shared a radio-friendly sensibility, which made them the perfect pair to duet on "House of Love," a song fated for both Grant's 1995 album House of Love and the soundtrack to the romantic comedy Speechless, starring Geena Davis and Michael Keaton. 

Grant and Gill had met earlier, but they didn't spend any meaningful time together until recording the video for "House of Love." That's when things got intense. "I think a part of me loved him instantly," she told ABC News, but she didn't do anything about it because she was married with kids. Gill was also interested-but-married as well. He admitted that after "House of Love," he kept Grant in his thoughts "pretty much" all the time and wrote his 1994 hit "Whenever You Come Around" about her, which features the subtle lyric, "I lie awake at night wishing you were mine." 

Gill's wife filed for divorce in 1997. Grant's marriage fell apart the following year, and in 2000, the available stars got hitched to one another.

It's a commonly held belief that during his '80s peak of musical genius, chart success, and sex appeal, Prince romanced every woman on Earth. That's not true. He only seduced roughly half of the women on the planet, including Scottish pop star Sheena Easton. 

Easton started off as a sweet and fairly wholesome soft rock singer with hits such as "Morning Train" and "We've Got Tonight," until Prince gave her a career makeover. She transformed into the sexy siren that performed the downright filthy "Sugar Walls," a song the Purple One wrote for her. But the first real work Easton did with Prince was to add a vocal to "U Got the Look." That song "was a track he'd basically finished for himself," Easton later told the Windy City Times (via Diffuser). 

Easton thought she was just singing backup  on the song, although when Prince released it in 1987, it was structured as a duet between Easton and Prince — the latter performing as his vocally processed "Camille" persona. "U Got the Look" hit No. 2 on the pop chart, but more importantly, it briefly brought Prince and Sheena Easton together in, to paraphrase "U Got the Look:" the dream we've all dreamed of: famous boy and famous girl in the World Series of Love.

In 1998, Jennifer Lopez was still a superstar-to-be, best known for movies such as Anaconda, Money Train, and Out of Sight. Marc Anthony was already well established as one of the most popular and successful salsa music artists of all time, so much so that he won a role in the Broadway production of Paul Simon's high-profile but ill-fated musical The Capeman. Lopez and Anthony met backstage after Lopez saw the show.

In her memoir True Love (via People), she says the first thing Anthony said to her was, "One day you're going to be my wife," which is the smoothest and boldest pickup line of all time. 

In 1999, while sort of dating, the two worked together a couple of times. She appeared in the video for his song "Contra La Corriente," and they collaborated on the duet "No Me Ames" for Lopez's first album, On the 6. However, that same year, Lopez divorced husband Ojani Noa and then moved on romantically to dancer Cris Judd, rapper Puff Daddy, and actor Ben Affleck. Anthony, meanwhile, married former Miss Universe Dayanara Torres. 

Conditions were finally right, and Anthony's opening line came true, in June 2004. Lopez and Anthony had two kids together before divorcing in 2011.