Taylor Swift Calls Cover by Berklee Musicians 'Stunning'

Violinist Tim Reynolds never suspected that his Saturday mornings busking in front of CVS on Newbury Street in Boston with guitarist Nigel Tay '14 would lead to the social media explosion that overwhelmed his Facebook feed Wednesday after megastar Taylor Swift tweeted a video of them performing and called it "stunning."

The video, recorded at Berklee in September 2015, features Reynolds and Tay performing Swift's songs "Wildest Dreams" and "Bad Blood" in a medley arranged by Juan Carrera '15. After Swift shared the video on her Twitter feed, BuzzFeed and Entertainment Weekly picked it up. And Swift liked it so much that she reposted it on her Facebook page Thursday morning. 

Watch Reynolds and Tay '14 cover "Wildest Dreams" and "Bad Blood" by Swift:

Stunning.

— Taylor Swift (@taylorswift13) January 13, 2016

From the moment Swift tweeted to her 70 million followers on Twitter Wednesday afternoon, an avalanche of attention and praise steered toward Reynolds, Tay, and Carrera. It was, Reynolds said, thrilling and overwhelming.

"I was so shocked that I didn't comprehend for a good couple of hours until everything started blowing up [on social media]," Reynolds, a violin performance major who is expecting to graduate this May, said. Within two hours of Swift's post, hundreds of people had commented on Reynolds's Facebook page. He hadn't seen Swift's original tweet because he didn't have a Twitter account.

"Everybody was like, 'Yo, you need to get a Twitter account so you can go on there and thank her,'" he said. 

But that would have to wait: he and Tay were on their way to rehearse for a show with Carrera and other Berklee alumni and students the next night in Los Angeles. "We were both trying to hide our excitement because we were trying to prepare for a show," Reynolds said.

Newbury Street to LA

Reynolds and Tay have known each other since 2012. After getting involved in performing music for Anchor Church in Boston, they decided to busk together on Saturday mornings last summer. They would regularly draw crowds of 20 to 30 people, with kids stopping to dance as they played pop tunes on Newbury Street in Boston. 

"A lot of people weren't used to seeing a violin and guitar," Reynolds said. Plus, they were playing pop songs that everybody knew. One of the passersby was Cory Henry of instrumental jazz fusion collective Snarky Puppy, who stopped to record the performance and put it on the social media site Periscope. That video garnered about 1,500 views, Reynolds said. 

However, the video that caught Swift's eye was shot at Berklee's David Friend Recital Hall in September after Carrera, who at the time was a student employee at Berklee, suggested that his friends Reynolds and Tay would be good musicians to feature on Berklee's YouTube channel. Carrera, Reynolds, and Tay selected the Swift tunes and Carrera worked out an arrangement with smooth, edgeless transitions.

"It's just so lighthearted and uplifting," Carrera, a contemporary writing and performance major, said of the performance. 

After Carrera graduated in December, he decided to head to Los Angeles to work as a music director, arranger, producer, and composer. On his first day in the city this week, Swift tweeted the video.

"I was like, 'No, this can't be real,'" he said. "It was absolutely incredible."

It was, by any measure, a demonstration of what can happen when a great performance and the power of the entertainment industry collides with the reach of social media. After his rehearsal Wednesday night, Reynolds went home and opened a Twitter account.

Reynolds, Tay, and Carrera will be performing with Berklee alumni Michel'le Battiste '15 and Guro Frydenlund '15, as well as Berklee student Matthew Hines, at the Mint in Los Angeles on January 14, at 8:00 p.m.