Canadian-born, Nashville-based artist Tebey has spent the last couple of years doing something interesting: taking some of the world’s biggest pop songs and rebuilding them as country records. His version of The Weeknd‘s “Blinding Lights” crossed 24 million streams and introduced him to a whole new audience. He’s applied the same approach to Maroon 5 (“Payphone”), Drake (“Hold On, We’re Going Home”), Avicii (“Wake Me Up”), Tate McRae (“greedy”), and most recently Justin Bieber‘s “Sorry“, out now.
Each one strips back the original production and reconstructs it with organic instrumentation and a modern Nashville sensibility, finding the emotional core of the song and letting it breathe in a different context. “I’ve always said that the best songs can sound great in any style, and it’s been fun bringing some of those songs into the country music genre” says Tebey.
Credit: Sean Cartwright
What makes it more than a cover project is who Tebey is as a writer. Parallel to his artist career, Tebey has spent many years as one of Nashville’s more in-demand songwriters, placing cuts with One Direction, Cher and Fifth Harmony, Joe Nichols (duet with Blake Shelton) and more, earning a US Billboard #1 with Justin Moore‘s “Somebody Else Will” and a Canadian Billboard #1 with Gord Bamford‘s “Dive Bar”. That background shapes how he approaches these reinterpretations. He’s not just transposing a pop song into a different genre, he’s treating each one as a songwriting exercise, identifying what makes it work and rebuilding it from the inside out.
Alongside the covers, Tebey is regularly releasing original material as well. His current single “That’s Gonna Leave a Memory”, a sun-drenched track about a summer fling that won’t let go, is climbing at country radio in Canada and gaining traction internationally. It’s a good indicator of where his original voice takes him, and the two strands of his output sit together in a way that makes sense: a songwriter who knows what a great song needs, whether he wrote it or not.
As an artist, the CMA Global Artist of the Year Award nominee has a Gold-certified #1 radio hit with “Who’s Gonna Love You“, further Gold-certified singles for “Wake Me Up”, “The Good Ones”, “Happened on a Saturday Night” and the Platinum-certified “Denim on Denim“, 144 million global streams and 1.1 million Canadian radio spins.
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