In 1996 Julie Doiron released a breakup song. Decades later, it's gone viral
Not for a moment did the Moncton musician think her song would be heard millions of times nearly 30 years later.
"We had just finished touring," said Doiron, who was the bassist for the iconic indie-alternative band Eric's Trip back in the early 1990s.
And what happened next provided the inspiration for the song August 10, which appeared on her 1996 album Broken Girl.
"I can remember the drive back from the tour … where we decided that we were breaking up."
In mid-November last year, Doiron learned from one of her daughters that the song seemed to be growing in popularity.
"Mom, I think maybe one of your songs is starting to go viral," her daughter told her.
The song was starting to gain traction on the video app TikTok and at that point had been used under a thousand times in videos.
And when she checked Spotify, a music streaming service, the numbers were still relatively normal — at around 20,000 streams.
But as the days went by, those numbers went up. And up.
"I didn't even tell my management team for the first week or so," Doiron said. "I just didn't want anyone to mess with it. I just wanted to see what would happen kind of naturally."
As of Wednesday, the Spotify streams for the song clocked in at nearly 40 million, and more than 33,000 videos have been created using that song on TikTok — not counting the numerous covers versions of August 10 that have been posted to the app.
Her other songs have received a boost because of the renewed interest, but none compare to August 10. Her second most-streamed song on Spotify, Soon, Coming Closer, has just under 900,000, also from the same album.
The numbers continue to grow by the day, and Doiron said her team is putting Broken Girl and her second album, Loneliest in the Morning, out on vinyl.
She has a few shows coming up to celebrate the vinyl releases, and it will be interesting to revisit all the old songs that she hasn't played in years.
She thinks the reason people are connecting with the song is that it's not "a big production, let's say, and I think that it's intimate."
Doiron also noticed the majority of people streaming her song are aged 18 to 24 — the same age she was when she recorded the songs on Broken Girl.
The album includes the viral breakup song, as well as songs about finding out she was pregnant for the first time and about her grandmother, who died before the baby was born.
For Doiron, it was a lot happening all at once, and she still felt like a kid finding her way the world for the first time.
"I think that 21-year-old Julie, when she would have been writing these songs, I mean, she had to write them," Doiron said.
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