Zach Smith never expected the song to go so viral.
On 4 January, the 19-year-old pressed play on an old track he found in his car; he was struck by how catchy it was – he’d never heard this song before.
When he discovered it had been written and recorded by his own father almost half a century earlier, he had to share it with his followers on TikTok.
“There’s a horn section! Just wait … It’s so good!” the Arizona State University student exclaims in the video recorded the next day, miming the keyboard riffs and brain explosions as he rocks out in his car. “And he never released it! I’m so mad at him.”
A musician himself, Zach – who is known as Zach Montana – would regularly share his work and what he’s listening to with his followers, which before this post amounted to about 10,000. So he didn’t think much of it when he uploaded the video before he went to bed.
By the time he woke up, the track, titled Surrender to Me, had been played thousands of times. Almost as many people begged for it to be released in the comments.
“I woke up to texts from people I never get texts from – like my hairstylist – saying, ‘Yo, this is crazy!’,” Zach tells the Guardian.
Within days, Herman Li and Meghan Trainor had voiced their love of the disco earworm in the comments, and Anthony Fantano – dubbed “the only music critic that matters” by the New York Times – called it “a banger”.
In the weeks since, it has racked up 3m plays and counting, as well as close to 10,000 pre-saves and hundreds of duets, stitches, covers and remixes.
And today the song finally got an official release, under the moniker FireCityFunk.
When the Guardian meets them over Zoom, Zach and his father – William “Curly” Smith – are in festive spirits. They’re in Las Vegas to celebrate Curly’s birthday. He’s decked out in a captain’s hat and loud shirt, every part the 1970s rocker; his son is sitting next to him in considerably more casual attire, excited to share his dad’s story with the world.
“It’s just something that’s been sitting on the shelf for 43 years,” Curly says. “[Zach] just discovered it in the car, did a TikTok thing on it, and the rest is history.”
Zach kept his father’s identity under wraps until release day, leading some to speculate the wholesome story was merely a ruse to raise Zach’s own clout online.
Zach laughs at this skepticism: “He’s a real person – see?
But his dad is also a real musician: Curly Smith has recorded, sessioned and toured with the likes of Boston, Jo Jo Gunne, Steve Ray Vaughan, Belinda Carlisle and Willie Nelson.
That’s why the existence of Surrender to Me didn’t come as a surprise; what caught Zach off-guard was the funk-R&B style. That and the fact it had never come out.
“I was astonished, like everyone else on TikTok, that [the song] didn’t have the recognition I thought it deserved,” Zach explains. As one commenter noted, Surrender to Me was “a classic hit in an alternate timeline”.
Within three weeks of the original post, Zach and William were in the studio used by the band Chicago (through one of Williams’ connections), getting the remastered recordings up to scratch for streaming.
After dozens of followers suggested it would be a perfect addition to the disco-influenced Guardians of the Galaxy soundtrack, some edited it into the film’s opening credits – and tagged Disney and Marvel in Zach’s updates.
It worked. Ten days after the initial upload, Marvel’s music supervisor, Dave Jordan, reached out to Jack, saying he’d put the song in front of the Guardians director, James Gunn. There’s no promises, but it’s good timing, given filming for the third instalment of the franchise is under way.
“We’re huge Marvel fans,” Zach says. “We’ve seen all the MCU movies. It’s something we’ve bonded over as father and son, so it’s really exciting to think the song could end up in one of the films.”
TikTok is the perfect platform for unexpected virality like this. The functionality allows users to build on songs as they re-share them, and means they have a built-in audience by the time they find their way into the real world. Musicians including Drake and Justin Bieber now write songs designed for the platform, and unknown artists can go viral overnight, topping the charts with fragments of songs that have seemingly little reach beyond the app.
“It’s a bit of a happy accident,” Curly says. “It’s music I did a long time ago, so to have it come full circle is really wonderful.”
He adds that the ways in which the song has been stitched, duetted and remixed on TikTok is new to him. “I’m having a lot of fun with it … and it wouldn’t have happened without [Zach].”
