In response to explosive fan demand on TikTok, platinum-selling and award-winning artist and songwriter Tebey (pronounced Tay – Bay) has released a country rendition of The Weeknd’s ‘Blinding Lights’. Released worldwide, the track has already had over 2.3 million global streams and 18 million impressions on Instagram; airplay in 9 countries; charted on Apple Music in 86 Countries; and hit Top 3 on the Spotify Viral Chart in Sweden and Norway, and the Viral Top 15 in his native Canada.
Tebey first recorded a short snippet of the song and posted it to social media (March 3rd), which generated such an immediate, positive response that his team encouraged him to promptly record a full studio version of the cover. The resulting TikTok clip of Tebey’s take on ‘Blinding Lights’ had over 12 million views in one week, and Tebey’s clips featuring the song have now surpassed 21 million total views. The official lyric video is available to view here.
His unique country twist on the acclaimed, record-breaking pop song rapidly captured the attention of users worldwide. It was even noticed by The Weeknd himself, who posted about the song on Instagram and reposted Tebey’s video on his own page; now his 5th most viewed TikTok video ever.
“It was never my intention to release a fully produced country version of ‘Blinding Lights’. This whole thing has been driven solely by the fans, and their reaction to a performance video I made to foster more connection with them on social media,” said Tebey. “I thought that doing a countrified version of a pop song might be a fun piece of content for fans and gain me some new followers on TikTok and Instagram, but I’m just as shocked as everyone how viral this has gone. Once I saw the reaction my version was getting online, my producer and I literally raced to finish the song and get it out to the streaming platforms within days.”
The fan-driven cover was produced by Danick Dupelle (Tyler Joe Miller, Matt Lang) and Tebey, and views across the artist’s socials continue to build at a rapid rate, with an increase of over 200% on all platforms.
After key country radio programmers expressed interest in receiving the track to keep up with the high demand from the public, the track has now been officially serviced to radio in Canada and multiple other countries worldwide, alongside his current single “Hold Your Horses”, which is currently in the Top 25 of the Canadian country radio chart.
ABOUT TEBEY:
Peterborough, Ontario native and current Nashville resident, Tebey is an award-winning artist, producer and accomplished songwriter with over 100 million streams, 608,000 Canadian radio spins and an audience of 998 Million to date (Mediabase). Overall, he has had four Top 5 Canadian country radio singles, five Top 10 singles and five Top 20 singles as a recording artist. Though he’s been experiencing a steady trajectory for over a decade, the past four years in particular have yielded some of Tebey’s biggest successes. These accomplishments include three #1 songs as a writer: a US Billboard #1 with Justin Moore’s ‘Somebody Else Will’ a Canadian #1 with Gord Bamford’s ‘Dive Bar’ and his first #1 as an artist and writer with his Gold single ‘Who’s Gonna Love You’, which also received a SOCAN award. 2021 saw the release of Tebey’s most successful album to date, The Good Ones, which included multiple Top 10 hits including the title track, a duet with Quebec pop star Marie Mai, followed by the Sink With The Sun EP in 2022. Most recently, Tebey released his single ‘Hold Your Horses’ this past January, which has been rapidly climbing the Canadian country radio chart.