Sadie Jean by no means anticipated any of this. Her breakout hit “WYD Now?” boasts over 40 million streams on Spotify, a pure outgrowth of its natural viral beginnings on TikTok with views within the thousands and thousands. The far attain has proven that the music’s aching piano sound and message of heartbreak have resonated deeply.
She did not count on this from a lovelorn monitor she penned together with her pals and fellow college students Grace Enger and David Alexander on a artistic weekend getaway. However that does not imply she did not work exhausting to make it occur.
“That was the craziest expertise of my life,” she tells us within the premiere episode of MTV Information Presents: Rising. Because the 19-year-old tells it, ending up right here feels wild, even when she’s been getting ready for it for primarily her whole life.
At 3, she would enlist her sister to jot down music concepts down for her as a result of, properly, she hadn’t discovered how you can write but. Meaning she boasts a private songwriting portfolio that dates again to elementary college and spans, as she stated, “drama on the playground.”
The drama of “WYD Now?,” although, stems from a way more mature expertise.
“I used to be so unhappy about my ex-boyfriend,” she says with an enormous figuring out smile. “Just a few days earlier than we left [to go work on music], I despatched a Snapchat to Grace of me, like, sobbing. And I used to be like, I believe this weekend can be a terrific writing journey.”
She posted the music to TikTok the day after it was accomplished. From there, she says, “it went sort of loopy.” She saved tabs on the play rely, and by the next week, not solely had she gone viral, however different creators’s movies utilizing her music have been additionally going viral, and in sure circumstances, even extra viral.
To take care of the momentum, Jean began an open-verse problem on TikTok, inviting folks to lend contributions to her music. One among them was Lil Yachty. “I died,” she says of seeing the rapper’s tackle her music. “I simply did not count on that in any respect. Every part stunned me.”
However nothing stunned her greater than when that TikTok fame translated to precise success as soon as “WYD Now?” noticed its correct launch on streaming platforms. She discovered this out, naturally, throughout a notoriously worrying and threatening time for college kids: finals week. Whereas sitting in school, she made certain to keep watch over the play counts as they ratcheted up and ship messages to co-writer Enger, who was down the corridor taking a unique course.
“We might be texting, like, oh my god, it is about to hit 500,000! Within the first day!” she explains. “After which we’d run out, and I might wave by her window when she’s in school, and we have been leaping up and down. After which it was on the iTunes charts. It was so wild. I nonetheless do not feel like I’ve processed any of it.”
One factor she has completed is carry out the music a bunch of occasions — together with an intimate, piano-only rendition for us in our studio.
Try the total interview with Sadie Jean within the first episode of MTV Information Presents: Rising, the place she additionally performs the music in full and solutions fan questions, within the video above.
