Teddy Swims was terrified to shift from covers to his own songs

You might know Teddy Swims as the Grammy-nominated artist behind the megahit Lose Control, which was the No. 1 song on the Billboard Hot 100 in 2024. Later this month, Swims will release the complete edition of his two-part debut album, I've Tried Everything But Therapy, which has already turned him into a global superstar.

But despite his success, Swims hasn't always been confident about writing original music because he got his start performing cover songs on YouTube. On June 25, 2019, he uploaded his first video: a cover of Michael Jackson's Rock with You.

"It was 10 years from Michael Jackson's passing," Swims recalls in an interview with Q's Tom Power. "I was just like, 'Let's just upload it and let's sing it and put it up and see what happens.' And then sure enough, like overnight, it had 10,000 views…. I was in bands at the time, so we were writing all the time … but I didn't expect [cover songs] to be the thing that connected."

After the success of his first video, Swims gave himself six months to make it in the music business by spending all of his free time recording more YouTube covers.

In October of 2019, he uploaded a tender and powerful cover of You're Still The One by Shania Twain, which went massively viral and ultimately landed him a record deal. Today, the video has more than 200 million views on YouTube.

"Me and Luke, my manager, I remember our first trips to L.A. and New York and we're meeting with everyone," Swims tells Power. "We would never take flights or hotel rooms from them … because we wanted to convince them that, 'Oh, we got this amazing YouTube business … so we don't need any of you.' But this whole time, we're going to L.A. and we're sleeping on the floor of Luke's sister's house and we're really roughing it."

Swims is now famous for writing soulful anthems about his personal experiences with toxic relationships and healing. But he says the transition to writing his own music felt "terrifying" because he was constantly comparing his songs to some of the greatest songs ever written.

That's the most relatable thing — the thing that you think only you are going through.- Teddy Swims

"I can see why so many people get stuck in a cover world where they never break out," he says. "It tore me up to be like, 'How the hell am I ever going to write a [You're] Still the One?'"

The other challenge was that Swims didn't know at first how to write an authentic song that his fans could connect to in the same way as they did with his cover songs.

"It turns out when you're trying to write something to be relatable, that is so not the relatable thing," he says. "I find that if you write things so, so super-ly specific about you, that's the most relatable thing — the thing that you think only you are going through, because it turns out everybody's going through the same damn thing."

I've Tried Everything But Therapy (Complete Edition) is out everywhere on June 27.

The full interview with Teddy Swims is available on our YouTube channel and on our podcast, Q with Tom Power. Listen and follow wherever you get your podcasts.

Interview with Teddy Swims produced by Vanessa Nigro.