Over 700K followers have already discovered rising singer-songwriter vaultboy. Since his first video in late 2020, the now-viral TikToker has creatively captured relatable feelings and emotions in 60 second clips.
One of the first TikToks to gain traction for the Florida artist was a conversational song “about looking on the bright side.” At nearly 2 million views, vaultboy decided to transform the demo into his full-length debut single, “everything sucks” co-written and co-produced by fellow artist gnash.
We caught up with vaultboy to chat about the single, music video, and more!
Excerpt from the podcast:
Congrats on the release of your debut single, “everything sucks.” How does it feel to have that out in the world and to have people listening?
I just think that it’s crazy that I get to do any of this, that I get to make music and people listen to it. So it’s just all crazy. At any given month, I won’t be able to predict accurately what could happen in the month after and that’s kind of how this feels. . I’ve been working towards putting out music for awhile and so it feels amazing.
Was music something that you always wanted to pursue?
Yeah, I’ve been the kid who, when I was like eight, was like, ‘I’m going to be a rockstar when I grow up.’ You know what I mean? That’s been me forever. I haven’t really given it up yet.
Do you remember growing up who was playing in your house or what your parents were listening to, and if they have any effect on your music today?
When I was really young, there were like three different types of music going on at any given time, in any given week. It was my dad playing classic rock, anything from Styx to just classic rock in general, super into that. My mom was into super Christian music, whatever was popular at the time in the nineties. I don’t know the late nineties, early two thousands, whenever that was. Everyone on my mom’s side of the family was super into country. So I had this revolving classic rock, country, Christian things, none of which I identify with necessarily, but were super involved in shaping … for example, the classic rock got me really into guitar and I think the country songs really taught me a lot about songwriting. I just kind of learned a lot from everywhere, you know?
With country, you have a lot of storytelling in it, and I feel like a lot of your music, especially in “everything sucks,” it has a story to it. It was actually part of a 30 day writing challenge, right? It was day 12. What inspired you to start that challenge?
That challenge was great. I think at the end of the year I was having some issues with my throat. So I wasn’t able to make as much content as I was hoping to, but come the new year, I was like, all right, I want to do something like a series that I can stick to that can challenge me, that I can basically stay focused on. Because sometimes making content, you just don’t know what to do. Sometimes it’s like, oh, I have all these ideas, but then I ended up with two and then I ended up recording one and it’s just very stressful. This song a day was very simple – write a song every day, post it,. Then after a few days it became, write a song based off the comments. That’s just what I was doing because I felt like it was easier to write songs when I didn’t have to come up with the actual idea. I could just hear the topic then write it. Um, but uh, serious is great. Yeah. That’s I just kind of was like, I want to do something that’s challenging and fun, I guess.
Was it exciting to see people commenting, giving you ideas, that they were so engaged in that challenge?
Totally. I think some of the posts have thousands and thousands of ideas. It’s crazy. The crazy thing for me is how many people have some of the same ideas. People want the same stuff, and that’s usually what I tried to pick. And obviously if a comment is the top comment on a video, cause like it’s a song idea and then like 300 people say, I like that idea as well. It’s cool because it really helps me, I think, tap into how people are feeling, you know what I mean? What people want to hear a song about is usually what they’re going through, based on my experience reading the comments, because some of them are very specific. it’s really cool to feel like I’m in touch with what people are wanting.