Escaping the TikTok bubble and pursuing his passions is the goal of Redding Shealy, a musician at Winthrop.
By Kyan Feser
Staff Writer
Redding Shealy, known professionally as simply “Redding” (Redding26 on TikTok), is a singer-songwriter most known for his acoustic covers of rap songs. Most famously, Shealy’s cover of “Trap Queen” by rapper Fetty Wap exploded on TikTok, garnering over 8 million views.
“I’ve always done content creation,” Shealy said. “As a kid, I made Minecraft videos, same stuff everyone did. Vlogs or whatever. But I love music so much it kind of just translated over to that.”
In the year since his TikTok debut, the musician gained over 382,000 followers and 15 million likes on the platform. However, despite the success of his covers, Shealy’s main goal is promoting his original music, he said.
When promoting music, Shealy said using social media is close to a necessity.
“The theme where I’d take the rap songs and sing them with the instruments, that kind of just came about after like a brainstorming session of like, what would blow up,” Shealy said. “I figured people would probably think it was funny and then pay attention to it, and then I could kind of segue over to what I really want to do, which is create my own stuff.”
Shealy said transitioning your audience into your new content unfortunately isn’t easy work.
“You make a video that you know is gonna do well, and it’s a really popular rap song, and so that’ll get like a million views, and then you try to put your own stuff out there and get like 10,000,” he said. “In your mind, it’s hard to see that as anything but one one-hundredth of what you just did. But the way to combat that is think, wow, 10,000 people just saw my original thing. I gotta be grateful for that. Because if you’re always comparing it to the things that you are gonna capture people’s attention, it’s never gonna pan out.”
When it comes to Shealy’s original work, he takes inspiration from many different sources like pop, hyperpop, rap, country, rock, and folk.
“It’s weird to say because a lot of people have unfavorable opinions of this guy, but I love Ed Sheeran. I think the way he can write a song and combine all these genres into one is super sick,” Shealy said.
“I mean, just the whole genre of 2010s pop. Car rides to school, road trips, all that stuff. Just kind of in there forever.”
Shealy’s latest track, “half as interesting,” released on Sept. 12. Opening with blunt lyrics, the song confronts current issues head-on. These topics include the Gaza Strip and toxic fasting culture, all of which are heavily discussed on social media.
“The song presents itself as a bunch of unrelated things, but it is just like what you would see scrolling the news online,” Shealy said. “Those are the headlines, because they’re there to get your attention.”
If artists dance around issues, Shealy said people will not care.
“If you’re paraphrasing and saying things in your song that, like, allude to the problems that are happening, then it’s not going to hit as hard,” Shealy said. “So you have to be like, ‘children are starving in Gaza.’ ‘People are starving themselves.’ That’ll get people’s attention.”
These themes contrast the song’s tone, which Shealy said is dancey and in a major key. However, that’s exactly the point he wants to make.
“People are expecting this song, or, like a love song, or just some carefree tune, and then you start saying things that they don’t want to hear,” Shealy said. “It’s like, that’s how it has to happen.”
“half as interesting” and Shealy’s other releases can be found and streamed under the artist name Redding on Spotify, Apple Music, and YouTube
