"Surrender to Me" Is a Viral Sensation on TikTok, as Is the Dad Who Wrote It

As it's become more and more dominant, TikTok has also become a great place for musicians to show off their skills, and can even help individual songs go viral. Often, the songs that go viral on TikTok are from fairly major artists, but occasionally, the platform allows a song to go viral that is basically unknown. That was the case recently with a song called "Surrender to Me" which is several decades old.

In early January, a 19-year-old college student named Zach Wilson pressed play on an old track he discovered sitting in his car. After he liked the song and realized that it was actually recorded by his dad decades ago, he decided to film a TikTok in which he played it for the world. "He never released it!" Zach says in the video. "I'm so mad at him."

Zach is himself a musician, and previously shared his work with his followers on TikTok. Prior to posting the song from his dad, Zach had roughly 10,000 followers, and he didn't expect his father's song to go viral. After posting the video and going to bed, though, it did exactly that, and had already been played thousands of times by the time he woke up.

The video has now received more than 3 million views and counting, and it's also received the attention of people throughout the music industry, including Meghan Trainor and music critic Anthony Fantano, who described the song as "a banger." Now that the song has been played millions of times and also been featured in stitches and duets, it's also gotten an official release under the artist name FireCityFunk.

“It’s just something that’s been sitting on the shelf for 43 years,” Zach's dad Curly explained during an interview with The Guardian. “[Zach] just discovered it in the car, did a TikTok thing on it, and the rest is history.”

Zach and Curly also joked about the speculation that his dad wasn't real, given the fact that until the song was released Zach had chosen to keep his father's identity hidden.

“I was astonished, like everyone else on TikTok, that [the song] didn’t have the recognition I thought it deserved,” Zach explains.

The father and son duo also said they'd heard from Dave Johnson, Marvel's music supervisor, who had put the song in front of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 director James Gunn. Videos had already been made of the Guardians dancing to the song, which has a vibe that's very much in their wheelhouse.

“We’re huge Marvel fans,” Zach told The Guardian. “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.”

There are no guarantees, but it seems possible that "Surrender to Me" could continue to grow in popularity in the weeks to come.