Tai Verdes was an essential worker with a nine-to-five job at a Verizon Wireless store in Los Angeles three months into the Covid-19 pandemic. Then he uploaded a song entitled 'Stuck In The Middle' on TikTok, and it blew up until it spilled over to Spotify and topped the viral songs chart.

'Well, it was crazy because the biggest part was seeing it slowly, incrementally get bigger and bigger. It was never an overnight success. Every day, it got a little higher. I would be like, 'There's no way it's going to be 40,000 streams a day.' But then we got to 40, then 50 then 100 then it was doing 300,000 streams a day. I was like, wow, this is the song that people listened to. And now it's a cool feeling,' Verdes said about his reaction when the single became viral in a roundtable Zoom interview with the Philippine media.