Joe Keery turns 32 on April 24, 2024, and he received a very nice gift on this occasion: the song “End of Beginning” recorded by him in 2022 is one of the biggest hits in the world. The counters are counting millions of plays on various platforms and charts, and the strangest thing is that he didn’t even know about it at the beginning.
This song is hummed by millions. They didn’t know that it was sung by a famous actor
Keery is well known for his role as Steve in His character underwent an endearing metamorphosis before the eyes of the audience from a self-righteous, obviously very popular athlete at school, into a good and caring guy who helps the kids from Hawkings fight the monsters from “the other side”. . Since the second series of the popular Netflix series, his character has been in the foreground, and the actor has become a favorite of viewers. And at the same time, he tried very hard not to let his newly gained fame affect his musical career.
It is worth knowing that apart from acting, Joe Keery also creates music. In his 20s, he published songs under the pseudonym Cool Cool Cool, and later joined the psychedelic rock band Post Animal as a guitarist and drummer. The group was founded in Chicago, where Keery graduated from the Theater School at DePaul University in 2014. Around the same time that Keery auditioned for the Duffer Brothers’ series in 2015, the band also released their debut album. The next album was released in 2018, and this time Joe was also a vocalist.
A year later, due to the amount of work on the series A, he had to give up touring with the group. But he didn’t give up playing. In 2019, he released his first single “Roddy” under the pseudonym Djo, followed by a solo album “Twenty Twenty”. The next album “Decide” was released three years later – it also featured the now viral hit “End of Beginning”. And Joe himself was trying very hard not to show off the fact that it was all sung by Steve from “Stranger Things”. While presenting subsequent materials, he covered his face with dark glasses, grew a mustache, wore various wigs and other headgear, and otherwise avoided social media like the plague.
Why did he decide not to publish under his own name? – He doesn’t want people to listen to him or discover his music because he is an actor. That’s why he decided to first build a group of musically engaged listeners around his work – said the head of the AWAL label in an interview with the American Billboard. In fact, the label didn’t even know exactly who Joe really was when they signed a contract for his solo project.
The star of “Stranger Things” is surprised by the success of his song
Joe didn’t expect that his song would suddenly become so extremely popular two years after its premiere. In one of the interviews, he even admitted that “End of Beginning” is his last composition from which he would have expected it. Meanwhile, only on Spotify the song has 449,651,215 plays (as of April 22, 2024), and the music video, added only in March 2024, has been viewed on YouTube 3.4 million times.
– I have no idea what’s going on. “I’ve probably never been as confused as I am right now, but it’s a really cool feeling to watch something you write influence people so much that they embrace it as part of their lives,” he recently told the magazine
Joe learned that his song had become so popular from producer Adam Thein’s wife: she was the one who noticed that the song was becoming a viral hit. – It’s pure madness because I know things like this don’t happen very often. So every day I tell myself that I have to be very grateful for what happened – he said in an interview with . The actor also tries not to let the soda go to his head: – Now I have to try to do the same: write more songs and not expect who knows what miracles – he emphasizes.
– Music is a fantastic antidote to the fatigue of waiting for new roles. A lot of acting is waiting. You go to an audition, you hope that you will succeed, but sometimes it turns out that nothing will come of it. I would love to be in a big, cool movie, but it takes work. In the meantime, it’s very nice to have a guitar on hand that allows you to be creative at any time. I can’t just stand up and recite my lines to the wall. It’s no fun, he said.
It is worth adding important context here – in February 2024, Universal Music Group withdrew the full catalog of its artists’ music from TikTok. This is the result of failed negotiations between the platform and the music company. One of the flashpoints was the issue of appropriate royalties for creators and protection against the harmful effects of artificial intelligence, as well as protecting the safety of platform users – reports the portal. As it turns out, the songs to which the label had the rights constituted between 20 and 30 percent of the popular music available on TikTok. So since so many previous hits have disappeared from the platform, new songs and artists that were previously lost in the masses are now emerging. On the one hand, this is good news, on the other hand, there is a serious risk that users who listen to the same songs over and over again will simply get fed up with them. Every stick has two ends.
Source: Gazeta
Bruce is a talented author and journalist with a passion for entertainment . He currently works as a writer at the 247 News Agency, where he has established himself as a respected voice in the industry.
