A snarky grandma is behind this emotional viral TikTok trend … but she doesn’t exist

While record labels pray for a TikTok boost, this musician created an alter ego to avoid one

India TikTok (Copyright 2020 The Associated Press. All rights reserved)

Most major record labels would kill for a viral TikTok track. But Edith Whiskers couldn’t care less.

If you’ve been on TikTok in the past few months, there’s no doubt you’ve heard Whiskers’ dreamy cover of Edward Sharpe and The Magnetic Zeros’s “Home”. The song soundtracks emotional “grow up with me” videos, in which you can watch as couples meet, get married, have babies, etc. The stories are incredibly heartwarming. Some have sad endings.

As it turns out, Whiskers, who’s represented online as a snarky, cartoon grandma, isn’t even real.

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Instead, Whiskers is the creation of UK musician Tom Rosenthal, who originally recorded the “Home” cover for a friend’s short film in 2015. He said the track took him about an hour, singing both male and female parts.

Five years later, after an Australian TikToker @itishannahwest uploaded a snippet of it in 2020, the song’s popularity snowballed as others used it to montage videos about family, romance and the grandeur of life. Rosenthal’s lofty falsetto and reverbed piano strike a chord within the nostalgic TikTok genre. As of this week, the track has 872,800 videos on the app — with millions of plays.

@abbie.ensign

Our love story 💍❤️🍼 ##lesbiancouple ##lesbian ##lgbt ##lgbtq ##fyp ##foryou ##foryoupage

♬ Home - Edith Whiskers

@jfam.ily

i’m not crying, you’re crying. 😭 youtube: the j family 💛

♬ Home - Edith Whiskers

“The whole thing is a massive fluke,” Rosenthal, an independent artist, said.

It only made sense that Rosenthal should capitalise on the phenomenon, as many have done before: Shawn Mendes started his career on Vine, Alessia Cara on YouTube, Lil Nas X on TikTok. But Rosenthal was already an established artist with his music in movies and commercials. Plus, he said he’s got everything he already needs.

“My music makes money, so I don’t need much more,” Rosenthal said, adding that he’s had multiple labels pursue the song. He turned them all down.

But with people searching for the song outside TikTok, Rosenthal decided to upload “Home” to streaming services. He wanted to keep it separate from his other work, however, so it wouldn’t sit at the top of his Spotify page, being his only legacy.

“I’ve done hundreds of original songs that have been fairly successful,” Rosenthal said. “I felt like this would tarnish this bit. I didn’t mind losing that bit of how much of whatever I would lose, like name recognition.”

Thus, Edith Whiskers was born to front Rosenthal’s cover songs. Whiskers is an alter ego, whose name and persona were decided by his Twitter and Instagram followers. Rosenthal commissions artists and writers – namely his pal Alex Brenchley – to create a comic strip for her adventures, kind of like an inside joke for his dedicated fans.

“It was like a nice little club, you know?” Rosenthal said about collaborating outside of his main gig. “I try as much as I can to just not do music ... It’s lovely to have other stuff.”

Yes, you can find the real Rosenthal on TikTok. He made a video to let the world know he’s behind the “Home” cover, and because of that, he’s seen a “steady rise” in spins on his original music. But he hasn’t seen a viral spike – that’s reserved for Edith Whiskers. As far as TikTokers are concerned, Edith is the mastermind. Now, Edith Whiskers’ “Home” has a combined 29 million listens on Spotify and YouTube.

“The modern way we consume music is, ‘I love that song,’” Rosenthal said. “There’s a tiny percentage of people who investigate further.”

And that’s OK with him. In fact, Rosenthal set up a charity to donate the proceeds from the Edith Whiskers’ streams – a U.K. based organisation for young artists of color that has yet to launch.

“It’s just so much good luck,” Rosenthal said. “And it’s so little to do with the quality of my singing. Yeah, sure I sing well, but so do millions of other people. It’s a cover. It’s just pure Australian fluke.”