Harry Daniels on his viral singing videos and plans for a music career

The West Village is the place to go to see celebrity-watching, as anyone who has ever read DeuxMoi can attest. Pass by Via Carota? Taylor Swift could very well be dining there with Sophie Turner. Corner Bistro? You might see Jennifer Lawrence sipping a beer there. And on a recent Friday afternoon, Emily Ratajkowski scurried past the patio of Bar Pisellino. It was time for Harry Daniels to strike.

“Are you going to film it?” the 20-year-old TikTok star asks, handing me his phone. “I don't know what to sing to her.” Suddenly I'm running to keep up with Daniels as he walks up to the model-actress and starts what can only be described as howling a few bars of Charli XCX's “360”: “I'm everywhere, I'm so Juliaaaa! Woah-Uh “Oh, oh, oh!”

“Wait, this is a dream come true!” says Ratajowski with his mouth open.

“You in GoneGirl is so damn crazy,” Daniels replies. But she is too overwhelmed to accept his compliment – ​​she had just seen Daniels serenade an amused Vice President Kamala Harris with a piece of Beyoncé’s “Formation” in one of his recent videos. “Not Kamala and then Me!” says Ratajowski, laughing.

That's Daniels' whole style: He sings awkwardly, usually a little off-key, to musicians and other public figures, from Dua Lipa to Cher to President Joe Biden. Now he hangs out with idols like Charli XCX (“When I first met her, she said, 'I'm totally blown away to meet you'”) and Doja Cat (“This is one of my biggest heroes”) and texts with other internet celebs like Trisha Paytas. Although he still sometimes takes a guerrilla approach to his videos, as in the case of Ratajkowski, he no longer has to spy on celebs on street corners or sneakily evade their handlers – their teams come to him with requests for content creation.

“I don't have rich, well-connected parents. I'm not an industrial product. The only way to really get noticed is through social media.”

Not everyone understands the appeal of his videos, which combine the thrill of seeing a celebrity in an unguarded moment with the perverse pleasure of watching someone potentially make a fool of themselves online (“Not you!” Billie Eillish told him between fits of laughter. “I’m not going to stand here while you sing!”) But with 1.5 million TikTok followers and a deal with talent agency UTA, Daniels doesn’t have to justify his success to anyone.

“I've always said that I'd rather be ashamed and know that I tried and got closer to my goal than be ashamed,” says Daniels, who joins me straight from a business lunch at another New York celebrity hangout, Carbone. “Because it's like, who am I ashamed of? Some people I don't know? I'm not going to let them win. I'm not going to let them take this away from me. I want it. If I have it in my hands, I'm going to hold onto it with all my might until I can't anymore.”

Perhaps it was Daniel's youth on Stan Twitter – where pop stars' biggest fans discuss and dissect every performance, Instagram post or chart milestone with vital fervor – that shaped his drive. He first represented Demi Lovato before opening various accounts in honor of Fifth Harmony, Lana Del Rey, Selena Gomez, Billie Eilish, Dua Lipa, Haim and Lorde. But growing up on Long Island, a drive from New York City, Daniels had access to these stars in real life too. “I've heard Dua Lipa's [career] pretty much. I remember being 12 and going to her show that she did in the basement of Ellen's Stardust Cafe for MTV or something,” he says. “Then the same thing with Billie. I went to her first show in New York, which was crazy. I saw those two become overnight sensations.”

This made him something of an armchair label employee, like many pop fans before him. “I would look at people's careers and think, 'God, that was such a stupid decision. They should have done X, Y, Z,'” Daniels tells me as we go through the EmRata material. “Then I thought, 'Why am I wasting my time playing fantasy football in my head with other people's careers? I should apply that logic to my own!'”

Sabrina Carpenter was his guinea pig. In 2022, Daniels attended a book signing for the singer Emails I can't send album. At the time, he had been experimenting with TikTok videos and thinking about how he could get noticed. “I was with my friends and I thought, 'How fun would it be if one of us started singing to them?'” says Daniels. “I posted it on TikTok and it got a couple hundred thousand views and I had 500 followers. I was like, 'Wow.'”

“Who am I ashamed of? Some people I don't know? I won't let them win.”

When he began appearing at award ceremonies or speaking personally to the leaders of the free world, his success already sparked a lot of ridicule: What, so you can become famous for your clumsiness and inconsistency? Couldn't we get a real professional in there? But Daniels says those viral singing videos were never the end of the story. They were just building blocks for his real dream: to actually make music and sing.

“I don't have rich, well-connected parents. I'm not an industrial product or anything like that. The only way to really get attention these days is through social media,” says Daniels, who is not currently signed to a label. “That's the real reason I started creating content, because I knew I had to build the fan base organically so that people would really care about my music.”

His plan isn't exactly unprecedented—Lil Nas X, himself a veteran of stan Twitter, literally conjured himself a No. 1 meme hit with “Old Town Road.” And the demo Daniels shows me is totally current, reminiscent of Troye Sivan and Doja Cat. But how exactly is a guy who made his name by singing badly on purpose going to get people to take him seriously as an artist?

“For me it’s about integration [the music] into the whole world and universe that I've created in a way that feels authentic and kind of organic,” says Daniels (who actually sounds better on record than in his videos). “It has to be something that my fans can participate in and that adds value to their lives, not something that they support out of fanfare or pity or whatever.”

He has already chosen a name for his future fan base. “In my head, I just call them my Harrynators,” says Daniels with knowing joy. He's only kidding – but then again, it wouldn't be the first time that Daniels has risen to the top with a silly joke.