Harry Daniels Is Wailing With A Purpose

The West Village is the place to go for a celebrity sighting, as anyone who’s ever perused DeuxMoi can attest. Walk by Via Carota? Taylor Swift might very well be dining there with Sophie Turner. Corner Bistro? Maybe you’ll see Jennifer Lawrence downing a pint. And on a recent Friday afternoon at Bar Pisellino, there was Emily Ratajkowski, breezing past the patio. It was time for Harry Daniels to strike.

“Will you film it?” the 20-year-old TikTok personality says, handing me his phone. “I don’t know what I’m going to sing for her.” Suddenly I am running to keep up with Daniels as he approaches the model-actor and begins what can only be described as wailing a few bars of Charli XCX’s “360”: “I’m everywhere, I’m so Juliaaaa! Woah-ah oh-oh-oh!”

“Wait, this is a dream come true!” Ratajowski says, slack-jawed.

“You in Gone Girl is so f*cking insane,” Daniels replies. But she’s too overcome to accept his compliment — she’d just seen Daniels serenade an amused Vice President Kamala Harris with a bit of Beyoncé’s “Formation” in a recent video of his. “Not Kamala and then me!” Ratajowski says, laughing.

This is Daniels’ whole shtick: singing awkwardly, usually a little out of tune, to musicians and other public figures, from Dua Lipa to Cher to even President Joe Biden. Now, he’s rubbing shoulders with idols like Charli XCX (“The first time I met her, she was like, ‘I’m starstruck to meet you’”) and Doja Cat (“That’s one of my biggest heroes”) and texting with fellow internet celebs like Trisha Paytas. Though he still sometimes takes the guerilla approach to his videos, like in the case of Ratajkowski, he no longer needs to stake out celebs on street corners or sneakily circumvent their handlers — their teams are coming to him with requests to make content.

“I don't have a rich, well-connected set of parents. I’m not an industry plant. The only way to create real buzz is through social media.”

Not everyone gets the appeal of his videos, which combine the thrill of seeing a celebrity in an unguarded moment with the perverse pleasure of watching someone maybe make a fool of themselves online. (“Not you!” Billie Eillish told him between fits of laughter. “I’m not gonna 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 always said I would rather be embarrassed and know I tried and get closer to my goal than be ashamed,” says Daniels, who joins me straight from a business lunch at another New York celebrity haunt, Carbone. “Because it’s like, who am I embarrassed for? Random people I don't know? I’m not going to let them win. I’m not going to let them take this from me. I want it. If it’s in my hands, I’m going to give it a white-knuckle grip until I can’t anymore.”

Perhaps it was Daniels’ adolescence on stan Twitter — where pop stars’ biggest fans debate and dissect their every performance, Instagram post, or chart milestone with life-or-death zeal — that shaped his drive. He first repped Demi Lovato before making various accounts in honor of Fifth Harmony, Lana Del Rey, Selena Gomez, Billie Eilish, Dua Lipa, Haim, and Lorde. But growing up in Long Island a drive away from New York City meant Daniels had IRL access to these stars, too. “I used to study Dua Lipa’s [career] pretty closely. I remember I was 12 and went to her show that she had at the Ellen’s Stardust Cafe basement for MTV or something,” he says. “Then the same thing with Billie. I was at her first show in New York, which was crazy. I watched those two become overnight sensations.”

This made him something of an armchair label employee, like many pop stans before him. “I’d look at people’s careers and be like, ‘God, that was such a stupid decision. They should have done X, Y, Z,’” Daniels tells me as we review the EmRata footage. “Then I was like, ‘Why am I wasting my time trying to play fantasy football in my head with others’ careers? I should take that logic and put it towards my own!”

Sabrina Carpenter was his guinea pig. In 2022, Daniels attended a signing event for the singer’s Emails I Can’t Send album. At the time, he’d been experimenting with TikTok videos and was thinking about ways he could stand out. “I was with my friends and I was like, ‘How funny would it be if one of us started singing to her?’” says Daniels. “I posted it to TikTok and it got a couple of hundred thousand views and I had 500 followers. I was like, ‘Whoa.’”

“Who am I embarrassed for? Random people I don't know? I’m not going to let them win.”

By the time he started popping up at awards shows or getting face time with the leaders of the free world, his success was attracting plenty of snark: What, so you can get famous now for being awkward and off-key? Couldn’t we get an actual professional there? But Daniels says these viral singing videos were never the end game. They were just building blocks for his actual dream: making music and singing for real.

“I don't have a rich, well-connected set of parents. I’m not an industry plant, or anything like that. The only way to create real buzz is through social media now,” says Daniels, who isn’t currently signed to a label. “That’s really why I’ve started to make the content, because I knew I needed to build the fan base organically to get people to actually care about my music.”

His plan isn’t exactly without precedent — Lil Nas X, a veteran of stan Twitter himself, literally memed his way to a No. 1 hit with “Old Town Road.” And the in-progress demo Daniels shares with me feels firmly au courant, with shades of Troye Sivan and Doja Cat. But how exactly will a guy who made a name for himself singing poorly on purpose make people take him seriously as an artist?

“For me, it’s about integrating [the music] into the whole world and the universe I created in a way that feels authentic and feels sort of organic,” says Daniels (who, yes, sounds better on record than he does in his videos). “It has to be something my fans could be a part of that adds value to their life, rather than something they’re supporting out of fanfare or pity or whatever it may be.”

He already has a name for his future fan base picked out. “I just call them my Harrynators in my mind,” Daniels says with knowing glee. He’s only kidding — but then again, it wouldn’t be the first time Daniels rode a silly joke all the way to the top.