'This song doesn't even have a chorus.' You might not think you know singer-songwriter Shane Culloty, AKA Winter Aid, but chances are if you've been near the internet anytime recently, you've heard his work. Below, Shane revisits his unexpected journey to musical ubiquity...
This morning I made a cup of tea, pulled up TikTok, and spent a few dazed hours scrolling through an endless set of videos, each quite different but for the song that soundtracks them. By the numbers, it's one of the most widely heard Irish songs of the century, but most people won’t know its name.
An influencer wanders an LA homeless encampment with a hidden camera, asking vulnerable souls for a dollar before surprising them with NBA tickets. A teary-eyed wife discovers her husband’s cruel infidelity. Joe Biden, running for president in 2020, smiles warmly as he answers a phone call from a grandchild.
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Over the background of each of these clips plays The Wisp Sings, a song I wrote and recorded ten years ago. My voice, piano, guitar - the sound of a happy home, the drafty old Dun Laoghaire apartment I shared with the woman I love.
It was the first song I'd ever released - written and recorded at home on a budget guitar and borrowed piano, before I knew anything about recording. My abiding memory of the process now is of the last night, standing alone in a dark living room recording the vocals, smiling at how everything in the song seemed to be falling into place. Even my favorite part, the rising/falling piano outro, was improvised on the spot. The lyrics were similarly effortless, bundling imagery from the folklore of my Kerry childhood with abstract expressions of domestic contentment, and the ever-accompanying fear and worry.
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The song has 1.1 billion attributed plays on TikTok videos, but that figure doesn’t include the several billion views of unattributed videos across platforms. Watching a song go viral is a lesson in graphs and flowcharts: the numbers balloon rapidly until they are beyond grasping, and then you remember they still can’t cover the whole picture. At any time I can take out my phone and check the amount of people listening to my music on Spotify right now (320 as I write this), and marvel. Then I try and guess how many more there are, listening beyond the algorithm.
This song doesn’t even have a chorus. Ninety seconds pass before there are any lyrics. It’s scruffy; you can hear the clank clank of my fiancée washing dishes in the kitchen as I recorded just metres away. Even the title is a bit obtuse. How did it get so popular?
I wrote one of the songs the Internet plays when it's sad, and I can be proud of that.
The Wisp Sings was released in 2010 on a small but dedicated Irish label, Bluestack Records. There was no manager, no major label coffers, no savvy PR firm. It got a warm reception at first, maybe a few hundred streams, a dozen downloads: all more than I expected. Then Spotify picked it for one of its playlists, 'The Most Beautiful Songs In The World', and things began to get exciting.
Spotify obligingly shows me every playlist the song's been added to (4.5 million to date) and you can see how people feel about it by browsing the playlist titles: 'Depressed Songs for Depressed People', 'Songs To Cry To', 'SAD' and so on. To my friends, I admitted defeat in my long-standing insistence that I had written something happy.
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Listen: The Wisp Sings, slowed down to last one hour!
Messages and comments began to arrive, at first weekly, then daily. People would tell me my music saved their lives, or soundtracked their breakdowns. Newlyweds sent me wedding videos soundtracked by the song, as choreographed routines from contemporary dance groups began to surface. One observant fan shared an advert by a Chinese smartphone manufacturer, featuring a carefully rerecorded version that evaded copyright.
I was thrilled but overwhelmed. I could not make sense of this reaction nor figure out how to respond. Life went on; I kept up the day job, and released an album that was mostly ignored. I watched as my friends left Dublin, before a timely job offer in California saw us emigrate. Then the pandemic began.
Lockdown seems to have driven a lot of music listeners to the gloomiest songs, and while I was distracted (by Covid, homesickness, elopement) The Wisp Sings suddenly became a viral song for the saddest videos on TikTok - a meme, a shorthand to let you know you were about to consume 30 seconds of emotional vulnerability.
Things happened fast. I signed a publishing agreement and replaced my budget guitar. HBO picked the song for a new show’s emotional high point. I engaged in a back-and-forth with a TikTok star whose breakout song sounded extremely familiar. Amazon picked the song for a new show’s emotional low point.
I grew more confident as a songwriter, and wrote a bundle of Californian songs that showed it. I was glad to have new material - every new viral turn, from Joe Biden to gauzy "kindness content" reinforced the feeling that the Wisp was not mine anymore.
That’s okay. As proud as I am of this song - and how well it has done at spreading its own wings - it hasn’t really belonged to me for some years now. Revisiting it for its tenth anniversary, it’s been good to get close to it again, and remember that at one point, it had never been heard outside my living-room. We’ve just released its first vinyl edition, accompanied by a digital version with alternate takes and remixes from some of my favourite artists and collaborators.
It’s hard to describe how surreal the overall experience has been: it’s a dream for any songwriter to know their music has meaning for people, and I feel profoundly lucky. At the same time, it’s very much An Internet Thing now, and it seems clear that we don’t all wander the same internet anymore - when I’m home, it feels ridiculous to mention billions of listens for a song that nobody has written about, as a songwriter nobody has heard of.
I went through multiple phases of imposter syndrome, but thankfully there’s a metric for that, too: most streams of the song come from a listener’s own library. In other words, the algorithm may introduce the song, but they make the choice to return to it.
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Nowadays I can see that The Wisp Sings is a good and beloved song that was also wildly, improbably lucky. I have several album's worth of music that I'm dying to release, starting with a new single, Inner Sunset, so I won’t be resting on my laurels.
But I wrote one of the songs the Internet plays when it’s sad, and I can be proud of that.
Inner Sunset is out now. Find out more about the music of Winter Aid here.
