Who Is Rising Folk Singer Taylor Bickett?

The rise of the internet has provided musical artists with a new avenue for discovery, bringing us stars like the stunningly transformed Justin Bieber via YouTube, Nicki Minaj through MySpace, and Shawn Mendes via Vine. The popularity of TikTok has changed the music space even more, becoming another platform for established musicians to share songs and for up-and-coming artists to make a name for themselves.

Folk singer Taylor Bickett has joined the ranks of those who have gone viral on the short-form video app, alongside celebs like Doja Cat and Lil Nas X. You may have heard the rising songwriter's single, "Quarter Life Crisis," somewhere across the internet when it quickly went viral after its release in late 2022. Fans quickly responded to the song's expression of teenage growing pains with a doubly viral social media trend that exploded across TikTok and Instagram shortly after the song's release. 

Yet, Taylor Bickett seems to have much more up her sleeve and promises to be more than a one-hit-wonder.

In October 2022, Taylor Bickett's song "Quarter Life Crisis" went majorly viral, accumulating over 10 million streams on Spotify. The song is all about feeling torn between teenagerhood and adulthood, and the complicated feelings that come with growing up — something that listeners everywhere found deeply relatable.

The track's viral popularity reflects these universal feelings, spawning a TikTok and Instagram trend with social media users — including celebs like Drew Barrymore and Kevin Jonas — creating videos that show snapshots of them as teenagers before revealing their current looks. These now-and-then transformations are set against Bickett's song lyrics, "I swear 16 was yesterday / But now I'm closer to 28," narrating the photo transition.

In an interview with Repeat Replay, Bickett opened up about what it was like to experience TikTok success while seeing so many relate to her song through this trend. "I mean, to say it warms my heart would be an understatement," she said. "Aside from the fact that it's just incredibly cool that hundreds of thousands of people were making videos to my song, the trend was so sweet and nostalgic. When people shared photos of themselves at 16 and then now, I so often could visibly recognize a growth in confidence."

While Taylor Bickett found success on the internet in the 2020s, her musical journey started way before that. The Indianapolis native dished on her involvement in the arts at a young age on the "Bringin' It Backwards" podcast. "I think I did my first little theater camp when I was, like, maybe 7, and I started voice lessons when I was, like, 9. I was in choir, piano lessons, guitar lessons, the whole thing," Bickett explained.

Growing up, the musician was drawn to musical theatre, with aspirations of performing on Broadway in New York City. "Then in high school, I ... realized I like making things my own more than theater allows you to," she shared. Bickett went on to attend Bellmont University in Tennessee, where she began working with some of her classmates on songwriting and music production.

By 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic put a halt to her musical collaborations, so she shifted her focus to solo songwriting in her Indiana hometown. "I just start writing like crazy," she said. "I started posting the songs on TikTok, like everyone was doing, and that was ... where people started finding my songs. ... I got really lucky in that, around the time I was ready to start releasing music, I gained a little bit of an audience." With her musical background and TikTok virality, we just can't wait to see what the future has in store for this up-and-coming artist.