An Interview with Tai Verdes

 Written for Unclear Magazine, August 2022

Tyler Colon, better known by his stage name of Tai Verdes, gained a huge following on TikTok with hit songs like “Stuck In The Middle”, “We Would Have Some Cute Kids”, and “A-O-K”. None of that really matters to Verdes, as his only goal is to create music and content that makes him happy. Numbers, comments, and likes mean nothing to an artist confident in their craft. Verdes’ bio on Spotify is simple ‘Sing a lil’ till I die’, which is the best way to describe this California grown singer/songwriter. 
Tai Verdes performed at Detroit’s 8th annual Mo Pop Music Festival on Friday, July 31st, 2022. A crowd was waiting for Verdes for hours before he took the stage, and even though he has a large stage presence to match his following, Tai couldn’t have had more of a cool, yet kind, demeanor about him. He isn’t cocky, but self-assured in who he is as a musician. His sophomore album, HDTV, centers around the theme of love and the color red, a complete 180 from his debut LP, TV, and is set to release later this year.

Your career really shot up within the last few years and it’s no secret that a big part of your success has come from TikTok. How has your career been since the rise of TikTok? Do you still tend to rely on it or do you see more recognition outside of the app now?

TAI VERDES: There's 2 billion Tik Tok users and anyone who says that they don't have TikTok is a liar. And how can you say that? Justin Bieber’s fans are TikTok fans. You know. Who else? Doja Cat fans. Kendrick Lamar fans are TikTok fans. Social media is not like everyone likes to do this thing where they're judged on the social media that we're on, really just a reflection. What society wants at the time, you know, it's just a mirror, showing you what you guys are asking for. You want to educate someone on Kendrick Lamar, which we wanted before, but everyone likes to say like, oh, my gosh, what are you? What is this thing? What is happening? What happened when Justin Bieber came off YouTube? He's not just from YouTube. What happened to Shawn Mendes when he came off Vine? What happened when DJ Khaled came off Snapchat, he’s not DJ Khaled from Snapchat anymore. Every person that got on the radio that didn't have a fan base before that is now on the grid. The mother fucking radio! It's crazy. It's unprecedented, unprecedented times where we see deals with people that have leverage for the first time. You're seeing a more informed artists community and even though the artist community is probably still not even close to as informed as they should be, because you're dealing with, you know, kids, children, like 18 year olds, and money, which is not a good thing. I just feel really lucky that I'm 26 and that I've been versed in business before and I like marketing and artistry. I don't care if you like Kanye West or the Weeknd, everything that they do is marketing.

Do you feel with the presence of social media people assume that artists should be more available to them? Or that it puts a pressure on you to be consistent with posting?

TAI: Not really. Personally with my artist project, I am trying to make something and I don't give a fuck what anybody thinks even if my fans don't like it at all. Actually, I think that because I'm not making music for them. I think that's why people come to my shows, because they know that this person is doing something that they want to do. This is my art piece. I've thought about this for the last four years. I told my managers when I first met them and I told the record label when I first met them that I was going to have four albums. I knew that the first one was going to be blue, the next was going to be red. I can't tell you the next one, but I can tell you about the second one, which is what  we just finished. The theme of it is love.  I've been thinking about it for a long time. Actually, I will tell you the third one. It’s red and blue, 3-D. When you ask like an artist, what's your next album? They'll be like, I'm writing. What are you J.K. Rowling? Make something. There's a purpose to what you’re doing. I've been meeting a lot of artists and I realized that a lot of people are writing.

Can you tell us anything about your third album?

TAI: Well, the thing is, we're talking about 2023 right now. You haven't even gotten through 2022. You haven’t even heard the second one, you don't even know if you'd like it! Exclusivity. Mysteriousness.

It seems like there is a big trend on TikTok right now where a lot of musicians are focused on making music that they know will blow up on TikTok. Whether it be for a specific set of lyrics or a certain melody, do you feel the pressure to create music in that way?

TAI: My goal is to be the best storyteller of all time. Rick Rubin doesn't touch a thing, he just does everything by feel and just says, Okay, I'm going to structure like this, this and this. That's how I've made a lot of my music. For these TikTok artists, they are trying to put their music on the platform in a way that probably isn't questioned. I made songs that have interested me. If I can remember the entire verse, because I have to read a bunch of songs, then other people as well need to understand that the story is taking some of the cadences to catch up. A lot of artists are going in and trying to write a chorus and the difference between me and other artists is that my verses go viral, not just a line or a concept or the videos. For “Last Day on Earth”, that's a 45 second video viral. That's my entire verse. Look at the actual reason why the songs go viral. Oh, is it a trend? Okay, when the dance goes away, does the song go away? When everyone's done that, and then it goes away, but if you do have a thing that everyone's like, “Yeah, this is a good verse”, then you did what you had to do. I really do believe that Lizzo wants to dance on stage, which is also a really cool vibe. I think that it's really cool that dancers can also share their art being shared in a community, and dance is so big right now. It's affecting the community, which is amazing. For storytelling and lyrics, this is another unprecedented time for storytelling, because, you know, it's not going viral on Tiktok, which can hurt. Think Doja Cat. She’s writing whole novels in verses. You know me, I like to say that I do the same thing. If you see Harry Styles, he has very intentional storytelling based music. Any of the other sounds that you hear that go viral on Tiktok, if you can ask the question, what's next? Is it a lyric, a video, you never know.

Did you ever expect this type of outcome from sharing your music on TikTok?

TAI: Yeah, I knew I was gonna do it. Not because I'm cocky, but because I’ve been doing this for longer than everybody else. This isn’t my first time being a content creator. I was doing YouTube. I've been editing my videos. I've been editing my words and face for the last five years. Then an app comes along where you edit your words and face and that's all I have to do. I don't have to do any crazy 3d graphics. You put these two things together and think I’m not going to win? It's literally the easiest part. All I had to do was write the songs. That was the hard part. The things that I've been doing for TikTok, sharing my personality, knowing when to cut out words, knowing how to jump cut into your topic, knowing that videos need to have premises, that's what makes an artist be able to stay an artist and not look like an influencer. If your eyes are looking around while you're talking and you're not looking at the camera while you're speaking or if you have any sort of stutter or anything, unless it's intentional, then you look like any other influencer. There's a science to it to be honest.

It definitely seems that you’ve had the practice that other artists are just figuring out for the first time.

TAI: I think that's great. Right now, everyone's gotten mad at TikTok artists because they're like, why are you guys bad at this? Well, they're all first time content creators. If you look at Doja Cat, she was making YouTube videos. The people that have been doing it themselves are really, really getting a head start right now. That's why I don't need I don't need a radio team to be like, what's your next song? You know, I don't really need a right like, I own everything.

Being a content creator and mainly based on the internet for the past few years, does it ever get old seeing that the people leaving you comments and likes are the real people coming out to see your shows?

TAI: No, just I see people waiting for my sets and stuff like that, I know that I'm doing something right. I'm competitive, too. I just try to make every single show the best show that I can. I'm competing against  myself really just because how I got here is I looked at every single singer on YouTube and I looked at male compilation singers. And I thought, I can fucking do this. Then I’m in my car, singing every single day. Am I the best? No, but I definitely am in my year one, and I just did 100 shows.

When you are writing music or making videos, where do you look for inspiration?

TAI: I just try to keep an open mind. In general, if I say something very naturally, I try to write a lyric down. Or if someone else says something to me, that's really natural, I'm like, Wow, that's a good lyric. The second is YouTube. I found that there is a dude in France, playing a really interesting baseline. I organized it, I produced it, I structured it. I decided to make a song out of it, added some hey hey’s, and it was ready to go. 

In an interview earlier this year you had mentioned that one goal you had was to pursue yoga more consistently. How is that going?

TAI: Oh yeah, that didn't last long. I fucked up, I fucked up really hard. You're gonna make me do yoga after this. I got a yoga mat yesterday. So there’s been a lot of signs saying that I need to get back into it and my knees hurt!

I'm the kind of person that's done 30 days straight of stuff. I've done 30 days straight of yoga. I’ve done seven days straight of no eating. I’ve eaten at Chipotle for a month straight. That one wasn’t even a challenge, I think I was just depressed. It happens.

Tai Verdes

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Listen to Tai Verdes here.