On a Sunday afternoon in Feb. ,University of Southern California students sat hunched over desks throughout campus cramming for midterms. While they were memorizing notes for exams, junior Taylor Edlin was harmonizing notes with James Charles at the YouTube personality’s home (their rendition of Britney Spears’s “Baby…One More Time” has garnered more than 600,000 views).
Earlier that day, I met Edlin at his own residence to interview the TikTok singing sensation who has amassed half a million followers on the short-form video content app. His Victorian-style abode in L.A. is the home of the SoCal VoCals, USC’s premiere co-ed a cappella group, of which Edlin is a proud member. As I entered the front hallway, I immediately felt like I was in an artsy frat house. Beneath my feet was a large rug bearing the Vocals’ logo, and a red glow emanated from the den to my right. It could have been 3 a.m. or 3 p.m.
We walked upstairs to a bedroom belonging to one of his roommates (the TikTok star joked that his own room is a “closet”), which was filled with recording equipment, a skateboard, a decorative tapestry and an upright mattress. He apologized for the mess, even though it was not his doing.
The 21-year-old has piercing blue eyes and palpable charisma. One of his TikTok followers compared his looks to Daniel Radcliffe, but I see a young Elijah Wood. Clad in a maroon henley shirt and grey plaid joggers, he leaned forward when speaking, actively engaged. As I got out my recording device, Edlin informed me that his mom Leisa Zigman used to be an investigative reporter. And as he launched into his story—stopping at one point to ask, “Am I doing okay?”—it became clear that he was going to take the reins. I was just happy to be along for the ride.
Growing up in St. Louis, Edlin trained to be a classical pianist and performed musical theatre at the renowned St. Louis Municipal Opera Theatre, also known as the Muny. All of his signature riffs, however, are self-taught. “Music has always been an innate part of him,” said Zigman, over the phone. “It’s as much a part of him as he is right-handed and has blue eyes. It’s who he is.” And yet, no one else in the family sings. Outside of the arts, Edlin’s passion for tumbling led to the pursuit of diving. His senior year of high school, he ranked eighth in the state.
Even though he secretly wanted to be a performer, he declared a major in Health and Human Science at USC on a pre-medical track. Math and science are in his blood: Edlin’s dad is a dentist, and his mom is currently the President of the Genome Partnership, which organizes the preeminent global genomic science conference. In high school, he shadowed plastic surgeons to learn more about their medical specialty. “I just saw this really cool career of helping people look at themselves in the mirror and smile and be a little happier,” he said.
So how does a pre-med college student become “TikTok famous”? Let’s rewind to the summer of 2019, when the TikTok star received a text from his friend and fellow VoCals singer Conner Pearl. “I said something along the lines of, ‘You were made for TikTok, or TikTok was made for you. You need to get on TikTok. You would go viral,’” said Pearl, a Music Industry and Marketing major. He knew that Edlin ’s “robotics riffs” would make him stand out on the platform. “You don’t really hear that anywhere else,” he said.
And with that, @tayloresings was born.
TikTok is Gen Z’s playground. The popular short-form video app has been downloaded over 1.5 billion times, taking social media by storm. Originally known as Musical.ly—which Edlin thought was a “little kid’s lip-syncing” app—TikTok rebranded and relaunched in 2018. Now, everyone from my 12-year-old cousin to Justin Bieber is on the app, creating digestible content that ranges from choreography to comedy. Whereas Instagram is aspirational, TikTok feels more authentic and accessible.
Just like Edlin, many stars have been discovered on TikTok. Rapper Lil Nas X got his big break on the video-sharing app with the Grammy-winning viral hit “Old Town Road.” Barbie doll lookalike Loren Gray had a cameo in Taylor Swift’s music video for “The Man.” And Charli D’Amelio, the 15-year-old dancing queen of TikTok, was featured in a Super Bowl commercial last month. She recently dethroned Gray as the most popular creator on the app, boasting over 44 million followers.
With 525,000 followers and counting, Edlin is a TikTok star in his own right. Even celebrities have commented on his videos and reached out to show their support. “Meghan Trainor DMed me and was like, ‘Oh my God, I saw your TikTok and I love you! Would love to write a song with you one day,’” said Edlin. “I said, ‘Okay, literally Meghan Trainor, name the time and the place, and I’m there. I don’t care. I’ll drop whatever I’m doing and I’m coming.’” Edlin has also collaborated with Mitch Grassi from Pentatonix. “I literally grew up watching him and being like, I’m going to learn how to sing like that,” said Edlin . “I would watch him every night before I went to bed and worked really hard to try to be the musician that Mitch is. And then I got to sing with him.”
But with all of the attention Edlin has received, he said, “The coolest thing was getting to become friends with James Charles.” The beauty influencer and makeup artist—known for his cheerful greeting, “Hi sisters!”—has over 50 million followers across social media. Last year’s YouTube scandal threatened to permanently cancel James Charles, but TikTok has given the Internet personality a new outlet and community to express himself. After James Charles followed Edlin on the app, the two bonded over sharing mutual friends in the a cappella world and wound up singing together on multiple occasions.
@tayloresings (Hit Me) Baby One More Time-with @jamescharles @gaba.mp3 ##jamescharles ##music ##britneyspears ##britneychallenge
♬ original sound - tayloresings
Perhaps Edlin’s most unexpected collab has been with his own physics teacher Chris Sutherland. The 27-year-old professor runs his own TikTok account, which he describes as “half funny, half wholesome.” During a lecture in January, he needed a volunteer to do the Renegade dance for a physics experiment, so Edlin offered to help. “I had no idea who he was,” said Sutherland. “He was just a kid that sat in the back of my class.” Shortly afterwards, the professor learned that Edlin is “TikTok famous.” An a cappella singer in college himself, Sutherland later teamed up with Edlin to duet the song “True Colors.” The physics professor sang Edlin’s praises, particularly “the way that he can hit a crazy amount of notes in a short amount of time and hit them all very well.” Edlin said that according to Sutherland, “there’s so much fun physics that go with vocal singing.”
The SoCal VoCals gave Edlin the confidence to post on TikTok in the first place and taught him how to blend with other voices. Right away, the singer began crafting a strategy to gain new followers. “I started making little friends on TikTok by [doing duets with] people that were already pretty big on the app,” he said. Harmony became his hallmark.
“Edlin has been humming his whole life and finding harmonies since he could hum,” Zigman said. “I think when I would watch some of his videos on TikTok is when I made the connection that he’s been doing this his whole life, because of the humming. I think he was trying to harmonize with whatever he was hearing.”
As Edlin talks, he glides his hands for emphasis, almost as if he were conducting. “When I sing, everybody always says, ‘Do the Taylor arm,’” he said. “I’m imagining a keyboard and then playing the notes with my hand. I have so many licks, classical scales, that I learned from piano that I just visualize it in my head and then I can sing it.” For musical inspiration, Edlin listens to jazz arrangements and to Jacob Collier, “the Mozart of our generation.” “I try to incorporate weird harmonies that people haven’t heard a lot of before, which I think sets me apart from other singers,” he said.
As fall semester began and Edlin’s fanbase continued to expand, he said that TikTok became “probably the most important thing in my life.” In October, his cover of the Katy Perry song “Dark Horse” was his first video to hit a million views. “It was the scariest thing ever,” he said with a laugh. “I thought it was the coolest thing in the world.”
Edlin estimates he gains about 2,000 new followers on average each day. “When I first started, I couldn’t have predicted any of this,” he said. “I thought it’d be a really cool goal to get over 1,500 followers, which is what I had on Instagram.” Now his Instagram has over 30,000 followers—enough to be considered a “micro-influencer” but not quite enough to be “Instagram famous.”
Oddly enough, Edlin was never an active social media user during his teenage years. “Growing up, I was very slow into the social media game,” he said. “I really didn’t like it.” Case in point: he deleted his Twitter account after just one day. But Edlin is not on TikTok for the clout, as the kids say. “Edlin was born humble and doesn’t do music for fame or accolades,” Zigman said. “He does it because it’s part of who he is, and he loves it.”
Even so, it’s hard to deny Edlin ’s growing online presence. Pearl said, “We were at Five Guys and the guy flipping burgers behind the counter was like, ‘Are you the guy from TikTok?’”
When discussing his followers (“I hate saying fans—it’s really weird”), Edlin’s gaze turned downwards, as if he were hiding from the spotlight. He flat-out denied being famous. “I feel like I’m no different than anybody else who doesn’t post on TikTok. I’m the weirdest person ever. I’m such a dork. I’m just cuckoo bananas,” he said with a chuckle.
@tayloresings @charlieputh killed the beat! @benhouselog killed the lyrics!! Not really sure about that vocalist doe 👀 ##charlieputh
♬ original sound - tayloresings
But has Internet fame changed Edlin at all? “I wouldn’t say he’s changed. I’d say he’s more confident in his music ability,” Pearl said. “He tends to not let it go to his head too much.” And Edlin’s mother knows that her family will always keep Edlin grounded. “He’s got some solid Midwestern roots,” she said.
Having once been self-conscious about his talent, Edlin is “so honored and happy” that he is now an inspiration to others. “I would watch super amazing singing videos on YouTube when I was younger and look at these people, and I would just be like, this is who I want to be when I grow up, and to be that for somebody else is just mind-blowing. It gives me chills,” he said, looking down at his arms.
But with the love comes some hate. “I get a lot of hate comments, but I just delete them and block them,” said Edlin “It doesn’t really hurt me because people have been mean to me my entire life. I was bullied so much growing up, so from a stranger? I don’t care. It does get hard, though, when I see some really mean stuff, but at the end of the day I believe in myself, and 400,000 followers believe in me, so I don’t really care about the hate.”
As we were wrapping up our conversation, Edlin told me about his upcoming a cappella competition in San Francisco, featuring his first solo and vocal arrangement with the SoCal VoCals. As Visual Performance Director of the group, he had to choreograph an entire three-piece musical set (“Oh, I also dance,” he said with a laugh). And he had a big physics test in a few days. But TikTok is still a priority.
“If it’s me going to James Charles’ house or studying, I’m going to pick James Charles’s house because that’s cooler. But I do make sacrifices a lot for school, even though I don’t really know where my heart is at,” he said. “I used to be super goal-oriented with my career as being pre-med. Since I started this silly little app, my mindset has completely changed, and so school has been really, really hard for me.”
As for the future, does Edlin want to pursue a career in music or medicine? That’s the million-dollar question for the TikTok star with over 12 million likes. “If I can make money [being a singer], one hundred percent,” he said. (Other than the 50 dollars Edlin once made by going live on TikTok and receiving gift payments from followers, he has yet to earn money on the platform.) But Edlin knows exactly what he’s going to do with his first big paycheck. “I have a 6S. I’m really hoping I can make enough money to buy a better phone because my camera quality is the worst ever,” he said. “This was the first iPhone I ever had. Thank God I made it so far with this dinosaur.”
That dinosaur may be prehistoric in today’s digital age, but it gave Edlin a priceless gift. “Before this whole TikTok thing, I really didn’t believe in myself musically, and so TikTok makes me think I can actually do this,” he said. “TikTok really just made my whole brain switch.”