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The Verge
3 hours ago
- Entertainment
- The Verge
How Knox Morris turned TikTok virality into a national tour
Knox Morris stands onstage, stares out into the depths of the famed 9:30 Club in Washington, DC, and raises his arms to the heavens. The backing track to his song, a synth-heavy pop-punk number called 'Going, Going, Gone,' begins to play at an absolutely deafening volume. Morris grins through the first few staccato bars of the track, arms still up, then grabs the mic and starts to sing. In only 12 hours, Knox will perform this song for more than a thousand people, on the opening night of his first headlining tour — and yet somehow this is the first time he's heard his own album at concert volume. It's about noon on a spring Saturday, and he's currently sound-checking for the crew, his band, and exactly four other people. Morris is a lanky, pale, late-20s Ohio native who says 'dude' in basically every sentence, and right now his outfit — black joggers, Crocs, and a white hood-up hoodie that doesn't quite manage to cover up his mop of curly red hair — says 'up all night playing Fortnite' much more than 'up all night playing the hits.' But as Morris picks up the mic and begins prowling around the stage, he seems immediately and surprisingly comfortable up there. This is more than just a rehearsal for Morris, who goes simply by 'Knox' as an artist. Today is the first day of the tour in support of his first album, also called Going, Going, Gone. He made the album in a studio; perfected it by listening to tracks over and over in the pickup truck he bought himself when he got a record deal; and did all his tour rehearsals with earpieces in. Now he gets to hear how they sound at room-shaking levels. 'It's so much different hearing it coming out of the front,' he tells me a few minutes later, flopping into a chair after finishing his sound check. 'It's just a new energy.' Over the last couple of years, Morris has lived out more or less the exact dream of millions of aspiring musicians. In a few hours, when the 9:30 Club fills up with his fans, many of them will have found him via a single TikTok he made on a whim three years ago. His music, which he describes to me at one point as 'what if you took singer-songwriter music and put an electric guitar solo in it,' has shades of early-aughts bands like The All-American Rejects and Fall Out Boy but with the lyrics of someone who has screamed Vanessa Carlton and James Blunt songs in their car. People liked it: Morris quickly signed with Atlantic Records, started touring with his favorite bands, gained a following, sold out small shows, sold out bigger shows, and put out an album that has both radio hits and fan favorites. His tour will take him all over the US, and to Europe later this year. One argument you often hear about the internet is that it is a democratizer — great work can come from anywhere, and YouTube and TikTok have demolished the gatekeepers of old. (At least YouTube and TikTok would like you to believe that.) But even in the dream that tech platforms are selling, it doesn't often go this well. I asked multiple people surrounding Morris how typical his story is in the modern music business, and every single one of them laughed at me. 'This never happens,' more than one said. They chalk Morris' story up to a mix of his preternatural talent, his work ethic, and the fact that he's managed to tackle the music industry in exactly the right order. He's a wannabe rock star, turned social media star, turned actual rock star. He probably couldn't have done it without TikTok. But he also couldn't have done it with TikTok alone. A few minutes before the sound check, I find Morris in the back of his tour bus, parked right outside of the venue. He's eating breakfast and hanging out with his girlfriend, Alicae, and his writing and producing partner, Cameron Becker. Alicae is on her phone, and Cameron is playing Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga on the bus's Xbox. This bus will be home for the next month or so, but they've only been on it for a day, and they're still in awe of the thing. 'People wonder what it's like being a touring rock star,' Morris says, laughing as he points to the two — two! — TVs showing Becker's ongoing assault on a bunch of lumbering Lego AT-ATs. 'We have an Xbox!' Not that long ago, all of this seemed impossible to Morris. It wasn't even really something he dreamed about. He grew up near Dayton, Ohio, loving music but not necessarily hoping to make any. 'All my friends started listening to Drake and Lil Wayne,' he says, 'and I was listening to these singer-songwriters like Train and Ed Sheeran and The Script.' Sheeran in particular became a fixation. It might be a pasty redhead thing. Around the time he enrolled at Ohio University, he saw a video of Sheeran performing live — which Sheeran almost always does alone, with a loop pedal, building songs in real time, one instrument and layer at a time. 'He was playing these massive rooms,' Morris says. 'And he was playing G-C-E-D.' Those four chords are so ubiquitous in pop music that Sheeran himself once sat in a courtroom playing them on guitar to win a copyright lawsuit. And with just those four chords, 'he would have rooms in the palm of his hand,' Morris says. 'I was like, dude, I just feel like I can do that.' Morris started to teach himself the guitar (he now knows at least four chords) and began writing music. Morris never really tried to do the looping thing, though. 'I can't now,' he says when I ask about whether he'd considered going Full Sheeran. 'It'd just be, like, another redheaded guy looping.' (This is a theme, by the way: In 2019, Morris played Sheeran's 'The A Team' for an American Idol audition, and apparently judge Katy Perry's immediate reaction was to wonder why the world needed another Ed Sheeran. The question evidently stuck in his mind.) Morris eventually dropped out of college and moved to Nashville, hoping to make it not as an artist but as a songwriter. He got a manager and started hanging out and writing songs with friends, including John Harvie, a singer-songwriter who went viral on TikTok in 2020 covering and writing pop-punk songs of his own. Through Harvie, Morris met people like Lynn Oliver-Cline, who runs a music management and publishing company called River House Artists. 'He had just been hustling,' Oliver-Cline remembers, 'working different jobs and sleeping on different couches.' Morris showed her some of the stuff he was writing, and she offered him a gig as a full-time songwriter at their first meeting. 'Once I got signed as a songwriter,' Morris says, 'it was like, dream accomplished, baby!' His full-time job was to create songs with and for other artists, which often means making a simple version of the track — known as a demo — and shopping it to artists who might be interested. Morris needed to make some demos, so in early 2022, he called up Becker, then just a producer and writer he'd met a few times in Nashville circles, and said he had a few songs he'd love some help recording. Becker also happened to live in Ohio, which meant Morris could go home and see his family. So he spent a couple of weeks in Columbus staying at Becker's house — well, technically, Becker's parents' house. 'We were in his mom's literal basement,' Morris says, 'and we made seven songs.' The songs weren't finished or polished because they were only supposed to be demos to play for other artists. Morris took them back to Nashville and showed them to Oliver-Cline. 'I just wanted to look like a good boy to my publisher,' Morris remembers, 'and be like, 'I have songs!'' He hadn't written them for anyone in particular, but he liked them, and thought maybe he and River House could shop them around. Morris and Oliver-Cline both remember what happened next in exactly the same way. Morris played the seven songs. Oliver-Cline laughed at him and told him he was nuts. 'Do you understand what you've done?' Oliver-Cline said to Morris. 'If you think I would let you give those songs to someone else, you are out of your mind.' Morris had never seriously thought about being an artist. He was just an Ed Sheeran knockoff, remember? But he also knew chances like this don't often come around again. And besides, Oliver-Cline was pretty clear about how this was all going to go. 'You are putting these sounds out.' The TikTok that made Morris a star is, in retrospect, not a particularly good TikTok. Morris wasn't a content creator — he only started his account after Oliver-Cline encouraged him to use the platform to test out his songs. 'They were like, 'Let's make an account, and just start posting one song; if nothing happens, you don't have to put out any other ones.'' By 2022, TikTok was already at the epicenter of the music industry. That was the year Lizzo's 'About Damn Time' rode a dance trend to a No. 1 spot on the Billboard charts, and everyone was singing the alphabet thanks to Gayle's 'abcdefu.' That year, Nina Webb, then the head of marketing at Atlantic Records, told NPR that TikTok was the only music platform 'that will individually move the dial the way it does.' Sure, you could still have a music career without a TikTok account — but why do things the hard way? That July, Morris went on vacation with his family to a lake in Tennessee. 'I have a huge extended family,' he says, 'so there's, like, 50 of us.' Morris started posting TikToks throughout the week, all roughly the same thing: him on the deck of the lake house or on the dock by the water, doing something or other over a snippet of a song he'd written called 'Sneakers.' He posted a bunch of them over the next few days. One of them changed everything. 'I posted a video at, like, 11 in the morning and went down to the lake all day,' Morris says. 'I came back upstairs, and the video was at, like, 900,000 views.' By the next day, as he was driving back to Nashville, it was at 2 million views. That day, he started getting recognized in public. Lots of people already knew all the words to 'Sneakers.' It gets wilder: A week or so later, Morris was in a bar in Nashville and spotted Jeffery Jordan, the lead singer of The Band Camino, across the room. The Band Camino is 'Nashville royalty,' Morris says, and had long been one of his favorite acts. While he was freaking out with his friends about the celeb in the room, Jordan came over and tapped him on the shoulder. 'Are you Knox?' he asked. The two ended up talking and drinking together for a while, and it turned out Jordan had found 'Sneakers' on TikTok and had acquired the Dropbox link to the rest of Morris' EP. He liked it, and asked Morris if he wanted to come play some shows with The Band Camino. 'I was like, 'Yeah, dude, for sure,'' Morris remembers. Then he looks at me pointedly. 'Keep in mind, I've never played a show in my life. But let's run it, dude.' Knox opened for The Band Camino on a run of concerts starting in September of 2022. And this, not a viral TikTok, was the real lucky break for Knox Morris. 'The most important thing we ever did, that ever happened to me, was playing those shows,' he says. 'The problem with TikTok is TikTok comes and it goes, and once you're not doing those views, you're gone. But at the exact same time I was on everyone's phone for 'Sneakers,' I was being put in front of 2,000 real people every night for a week straight.' He'd stay late after every show, shaking hands and meeting people until security kicked him out. 'Sneakers,' and that first EP, brought him millions of streams on Spotify and elsewhere. It also got him a record deal — at one point he had 16 offers, Oliver-Cline remembers, but he ended up signing with Atlantic Records. Soon after, a poppy meta-reference of a track called 'Not The 1975' became his first song to get real radio play, and the first to hit pop charts in the US. And that song, plus 15 new ones, became Going, Going, Gone. With the album came the tour. Knox Morris became simply Knox. This is all an impossibly charmed story, the kind of thing that happens to only a lucky few creators and artists. For every Knox Morris, there are countless others who never get the algorithmic breaks or the rock star meet-cutes. Even the ones who do make it are often unprepared for what 'making it' means: Lyor Cohen, the head of YouTube Music, once told me that many artists are 'exhausted' by the new methods of hitting it big, and lamented how many wannabe musicians have been reduced to simply being a social media star. Morris recognizes how lucky he's been. Looking back, he's grateful that his touring debut and his TikTok virality happened together — 'They'd see me onstage and then go home and I'd be the first thing on their TikTok feed' — and thinks the only response to all this good fortune is to work even harder. He hasn't been doing this long enough to have much sage veteran advice, but he is certain of one thing: a few thousand people in a room meant much more to his career than a few million people on the internet. 'The advice I have for any TikTok artist, dude, is get on the road and go play in front of real people, and honestly get your show chops up,' he says. 'I've seen so many TikTokers that have a massive song, bigger than any of mine, and they step on a stage and they have no idea what to do.' That said, he knows that in the modern music business you ignore TikTok at your own peril. 'I cannot stand when I hear artists who are like, 'Oh, I don't want to make TikToks,'' he says. 'It's like, oh, then you don't want to be an artist that bad. You just don't want anyone to listen to your music.' The key, both to making TikTok work for you and to keep it from driving you mad, is to treat it like a tool and to understand that the soundtrack matters most. 'The focus of your TikTok should always be the music,' Morris says. 'It doesn't matter how sick of a video you make, it doesn't matter how good it looks. If the song sucks, it doesn't matter.' At this point, Morris has a few hundred thousand followers, a few million streams, and enough juice to sell out shows for a thousand people at a time. He could stop here if he wanted. 'I could do these-size rooms for the next 10 years,' he says. But if he wants to get bigger, to start playing arenas like Ed Sheeran? He needs to go back to TikTok, and needs to play it differently. He has to build an audience of people who care about him as much as they care about his music. 'You almost have to build this character,' Morris says, 'and that's something I'm still figuring out how to do. I wouldn't say I'm struggling with it… but I'm learning. It doesn't come super naturally.' Morris doesn't spend a lot of time thinking about his TikTok presence. He does use the app a lot — 'My For You page is Kai Cenat, Marvel videos, basketball, and, like, dick jokes' — but relies on his girlfriend, Alicae, to figure out which trends and dance challenges he should be jumping on himself. As far as I can tell, there is but one kind of TikTok Morris just flat-out refuses to do: the ones where the performer stops the show to get a wide shot of the crowd, or do a trending dance in front of everybody mid-set. 'I think those are horrifying,' he says. 'When you're doing that, you're showing you're more of a TikToker than you are a musician. And I want the focus to be the music, you know?' It's just before midnight, and Morris' opening act, a band called The Wldlfe, is finishing their set. The band has been around for a while and is clearly hoping for a Knox-sized break soon. Jansen Hogan, the band's lead singer, tells the audience to go to a site called to find their songs, and throughout their set I see people pull out their phones and follow the band on Spotify. It's all a little transactional and cringe-inducing at times, but this appears to be what it takes to make it now. Maybe you're always only one follower and stream away. A few minutes later, Morris bounds back onto the stage. The room is now packed, and the crowd goes berserk for the lanky redhead in camo pants and a blue-and-white No. 22 jersey. For the next 90 or so minutes, he plays nearly all of his songs. He gets decent responses to songs from the new album, and room-sized singalongs for his TikTok hits. The crowd is older than I'd guessed, with a lot of elder millennials in Something Corporate and Warped Tour shirts. I met a number of fans who found Knox on TikTok, like I did. But I also met a few who discovered him at those first The Band Camino shows, and others who stumbled across 'Not The 1975' on the radio. A group of bros from Penn State partied in the balcony throughout the whole show, and excitedly pointed me to the one who heard Knox on a Spotify playlist and immediately shared him with everybody else. 'This is the biggest headline show I've ever played in my life,' Morris shouts to the audience early on, and reminds them that 'this is our first show, guys!' when something goes wrong with a track a few minutes later. A few things do go wrong, and at one point Morris apologizes to the crowd for relegating one of his most-loved songs to an acoustic part of the show. Later, this will become content for TikTok — clips of the audience singing his songs, clips of Morris playing songs fans requested by holding up signs, clips of Morris in the parking lot playing acoustic sets after the show. He'll even end up posting one of those crowdwork videos he hates so much (and it'll do numbers). Over the course of the next month on tour, Morris will post almost every day. He has to, and he knows it: if he wants to play arenas, to be the biggest star in the world, to go Full Ed Sheeran, he'll always have to be both artist and creator. But that's tomorrow's problem. For now, onstage, in front of a real audience of paying concert attendees, he just gets to be a rock star.
CBS News
6 hours ago
- Entertainment
- CBS News
Nelly is final Minnesota State Fair 2025 Grandstand act to be announced
It will be getting "Hot in Herre" at the Minnesota State Fair when Nelly takes the Grandstand stage to perform. The fair announced its final Grandstand act for 2025 on Tuesday. Nelly will perform at 7 p.m. on Saturday, Aug. 30, with Ja Rule, Mýa and Ying Yang Twins. Tickets go on sale Friday. Seeing the southern hip-hop artist behind hits like "Country Grammar" and "Ride Wit Me" will cost you a minimum of $54. This will be Nelly's first time playing the Grandstand. Previously announced Grandstand shows include Meghan Trainor, Old Dominion, Melissa Etheridge, The Avett Brothers and Def Leppard. The fair runs from Aug. 21 to Sept. 1. Tickets will be $2 more expensive this year. Last week, the fair announced its new foods for 2025, including chicken-fried bacon fries, dill pickle iced tea and more.
Daily Mail
6 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
Huge steel fences are erected ahead of upcoming Oasis reunion gigs to stop ticketless fans from watching show 'for free' as Gallagher brothers return to Heaton Park
Huge steel fences have been erected around an area of Manchester's Heaton Park to stop ticketless Oasis fans from watching the band's reunion tour. The Wonderwall hitmakers performed two homecoming gigs at the venue on Friday and Saturday as part of their Oasis Live '25 Tour - which kicked off in Cardiff on July 4. But chaos ensued when hundreds of fans reportedly tried and failed to storm the fences to gain entry to the Britpop legends' gigs. Crowds also gathered to get a glimpse of the big screens on an area that has been dubbed 'Gallagher Hill' as they bragged about watching the tour 'for free'. Now, Manchester City Council have urged ticketless Oasis fans not to travel to Heaton Park over public safety fears, as well as erecting the huge fences to block the view from outside the venue. The Council said: 'With three concerts still to be played by Oasis in Manchester's Heaton Park following their two hugely successful concerts at the weekend, the city council is repeating its request for fans without tickets not to travel to the park. 'After taking stock of how the first two nights went, additional measures have now been deemed necessary and will be in place for the next three concerts, to protect the environment of the park, ensure areas of parkland and nearby livestock are protected, and maintain public safety. 'These include the erection of steel fencing around a large area of the hill within the cattle field in the main park - which is currently being developed as a new woodland area for the park and has been recently planted with around 300 young whips including Hornbeam, Field Maple, Aspen, Downy birch, Rowan, Common Alder, Crab apple and more - as well as measures to protect the livestock in the field, which include expectant and nursing cows and a bull. 'The erection of the fencing has a dual purpose - both to protect the environment from further damage and to dissuade people from gathering there. The necessary measure means the concert will no longer be visible from this area.' Fans reportedly tried to 'storm Heaton Park' on Friday as the band kicked off the first of their five-night stint at the venue. It has been claimed that the police were forced to intervene as people attempted to gain entry to the sold-out gig, with footage showing metal fence panels on the ground. Some of those who were unable to get tickets to the event appeared to take matters into their own hands and attempt to jump the fence. According to Manchester Evening News, an eyewitness claimed that 'around 50 people' had tried to 'rush' one of the internal entrances to the gig area. It was thought that 10 people got in, but the publication reported that the rest were 'apprehended and turned away.' The police later issued a statement to MEN confirming that 'no one made it through to the concert area.' The shows at Heaton Park - a 600-acre public park in Bury and Manchester - are the only UK shows held outside a stadium, with the others taking place at the Principality Stadium, Wembley and Murrayfield. Other fans were given a treat as many lucky music lovers were able to enjoy the bands opening night at Heaton Park 'for free.' While some paid hundreds to watch the reunion gig, some were able to catch the performance on TV screens. The screens which allowed hundreds in and out of the park huge screens measured 84 metres by 12 metres. This comes following reports Oasis have been inundated with huge, 'endless' offers to headline major music festivals. An insider told The Sun newspaper's Bizarre column: 'If fans thought Oasis were busy, they should see the offers their teams are fielding behind the scenes. 'Festivals in the US like Coachella want Oasis to headline next year, as well as big ones in Europe including Benicassim. 'Then you have businesses and individuals who want them to perform. The offers are endless.' But Oasis - who reunited this year after brothers Noel and Liam Gallagher put their differences to one side - are said to be concentrating on their current Oasis Live '25 Tour for now. Following a further three Manchester shows, Oasis will head to London, Edinburgh, and Dublin. They will then jet off further afield to the US, Canada, and Mexico, where they may 'tweak' their Oasis Live '25 setlist.
Malay Mail
7 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Malay Mail
Amy Search files counter report denying Shila Amzah's assault claim at KL rehearsal
PETALING JAYA, July 16 — Veteran rocker Amy Search has filed a police report denying claims he attacked singer Shila Amzah during a concert rehearsal at Merdeka Stadium in Kuala Lumpur. Berita Harian reported that Shah Alam police chief ACP Iqbal Ibrahim confirmed receiving the report last night, describing it as a 'counter report' rejecting Shila's allegations. 'Yes, a report was lodged, but it was more of a counter report and a denial. The case has been referred to the Dang Wangi district police headquarters,' he was quoted as saying by Berita Harian. Earlier, Harian Metro reported that Amy, whose real name is Suhaimi Abdul Rahman, had given his statement at the Shah Alam police headquarters. The move follows Shila's accusation that Amy had scolded her during the rehearsal last Thursday. Kuala Lumpur deputy police chief Datuk Usuf Jan Mohamad previously confirmed that an investigation paper had been opened into Shila's complaint of criminal intimidation. Shila, full name Nurshahila Amir Amzah, alleged on Instagram that she was 'openly attacked' in front of crew members during the session. Several veteran and popular artistes are set to perform at the upcoming concert.
Yahoo
9 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
The Ozzy Osbourne-Black Sabbath Farewell Concert Has Made Even More History by Setting a Record
The Ozzy Osbourne-Black Sabbath Farewell Concert Has Made Even More History by Setting a Record originally appeared on Parade. The 'Back to the Beginning' farewell concert to and Black Sabbath already made news earlier this month when it brought some of the biggest names in hard rock together to pay tribute to Ozzy and Sabbath. Now comes word that the show has also set a record by raising more than $200 million, making it the highest-grossing charity concert since and Ravi Shankar's Concert for Bangladesh in 1971 brought the concept of an all-star benefit show to the fore, per Billboard. 🎬 SIGN UP for Parade's Daily newsletter to get the latest pop culture news & celebrity interviews delivered right to your inbox 🎬 Earlier reports put the total from the one-day concert at $190 million, but that was only for charitable donations, per the report. The concert held at Villa Park in Birmingham, England, was streamed on pay-per-view by 5.8 million viewers and watched live by 40,000 ticketholders. The funds from the concert will go to Birmingham Children's Hospital, Acorn Hospice and Cure Parkinson's, which is dedicated to eradicating the disease Osbourne has battled since 2019. Alice in Chains bassist , who played in Osbourne's solo band and performed with AIC and Ozzy at the 'Back to the Beginning' show, took to Instagram to share the news about the concert's success. 'Rock is NOT dead. I'm so proud to be a part of the heavy community who not only showed how much they wanted to say farewell to Sabbath and Ozzy, really put their money where their hearts are and contributed to the largest single charity concert in history. So grateful to all the people on this planet who love distortion and heavy music. Thank you. We all did this together. #backtothebeginning#ozzyosbourne#blacksabbath,' he total from 'Back to the Beginning' topped other recent all-star charity shows including FireAid. That effort, held in January 2025, raised more than $100 million for victims of the Los Angeles wildfires in which 29 people died and more than 16,000 homes were destroyed earlier that month. Live Aid, which recently celebrated its 40th anniversary, raised about $100 million for famine relief for Ethiopia and Sudan. Farm Aid, the longest-running charity concert that was started as an off-shoot from Live Aid by Willie Nelson, has raised more than $80 million to help family farmers over the last four decades. The Concert for Bangladesh, the grandaddy of the charity concert, was actually a pair of sold-out shows held at Madison Square Garden on Aug. 1. It raised about $250,000 from the 40,000 tickets sold, but the charity effort didn't stop there. Following the release of the live album and film Concert for Bangladesh, organizers reportedly sent an estimated $12 million to Bangladesh via UNICEF, Billboard reports. The Ozzy Osbourne-Black Sabbath Farewell Concert Has Made Even More History by Setting a Record first appeared on Parade on Jul 16, 2025 This story was originally reported by Parade on Jul 16, 2025, where it first appeared.
