Knox Morris stands onstage, stares out into the depths of the famed 9:30 Club in Washington, DC, and raises his arms to the heavens. The backing track to his song, a synth-heavy pop-punk number called “Going, Going, Gone,” begins to play at an absolutely deafening volume. Morris grins through the first few staccato bars of the track, arms still up, then grabs the mic and starts to sing. In only 12 hours, Knox will perform this song for more than a thousand people, on the opening night of his first headlining tour — and yet somehow this is the first time he’s heard his own album at concert volume.

It’s about noon on a spring Saturday, and he’s currently sound-checking for the crew, his band, and exactly four other people. Morris is a lanky, pale, late-20s Ohio native who says “dude” in basically every sentence, and right now his outfit — black joggers, Crocs, and a white hood-up hoodie that doesn’t quite manage to cover up his mop of curly red hair — says “up all night playing Fortnite” much more than “up all night playing the hits.” But as Morris picks up the mic and begins prowling around the stage, he seems immediately and surprisingly comfortable up there.

This is more than just a rehearsal for Morris, who goes simply by “Knox” as an artist. Today is the first day of the tour in support of his first album, also called Going, Going, Gone. He made the album in a studio; perfected it by listening to tracks over and over in the pickup truck he bought himself when he got a record deal; and did all his tour rehearsals with earpieces in. Now he gets to hear how they sound at room-shaking levels. “It’s so much different hearing it coming out of the front,” he tells me a few minutes later, flopping into a chair after finishing his sound check. “It’s just a new energy.”

Over the last couple of years, Morris has lived out more or less the exact dream of millions of aspiring musicians. In a few hours, when the 9:30 Club fills up with his fans, many of them will have found him via a single TikTok he made on a whim three years ago. His music, which he describes to me at one point as “what if you took singer-songwriter music and put an electric guitar solo in it,” has shades of early-aughts bands like The All-American Rejects and Fall Out Boy but with the lyrics of someone who has screamed Vanessa Carlton and James Blunt songs in their car. People liked it: Morris quickly signed with Atlantic Records, started touring with his favorite bands, gained a following, sold out small shows, sold out bigger shows, and put out an album that has both radio hits and fan favorites. His tour will take him all over the US, and to Europe later this year.

One argument you often hear about the internet is that it is a democratizer — great work can come from anywhere, and YouTube and TikTok have demolished the gatekeepers of old. (At least YouTube and TikTok would like you to believe that.) But even in the dream that tech platforms are selling, it doesn’t often go this well. I asked multiple people surrounding Morris how typical his story is in the modern music business, and every single one of them laughed at me.

“This never happens,” more than one said. They chalk Morris’ story up to a mix of his preternatural talent, his work ethic, and the fact that he’s managed to tackle the music industry in exactly the right order. He’s a wannabe rock star, turned social media star, turned actual rock star. He probably couldn’t have done it without TikTok. But he also couldn’t have done it with TikTok alone.

A few minutes before the sound check, I find Morris in the back of his tour bus, parked right outside of the venue. He’s eating breakfast and hanging out with his girlfriend, Alicae, and his writing and producing partner, Cameron Becker. Alicae is on her phone, and Cameron is playing Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga on the bus’s Xbox. This bus will be home for the next month or so, but they’ve only been on it for a day, and they’re still in awe of the thing.

“People wonder what it’s like being a touring rock star,” Morris says, laughing as he points to the two — two! — TVs showing Becker’s ongoing assault on a bunch of lumbering Lego AT-ATs. “We have an Xbox!”

Not that long ago, all of this seemed impossible to Morris. It wasn’t even really something he dreamed about. He grew up near Dayton, Ohio, loving music but not necessarily hoping to make any. “All my friends started listening to Drake and Lil Wayne,” he says, “and I was listening to these singer-songwriters like Train and Ed Sheeran and The Script.” Sheeran in particular became a fixation. It might be a pasty redhead thing.

Around the time he enrolled at Ohio University, he saw a video of Sheeran performing live — which Sheeran almost always does alone, with a loop pedal, building songs in real time, one instrument and layer at a time. “He was playing these massive rooms,” Morris says. “And he was playing G-C-E-D.” Those four chords are so ubiquitous in pop music that Sheeran himself once sat in a courtroom playing them on guitar to win a copyright lawsuit. And with just those four chords, “he would have rooms in the palm of his hand,” Morris says. “I was like, dude, I just feel like I can do that.” Morris started to teach himself the guitar (he now knows at least four chords) and began writing music.

Morris never really tried to do the looping thing, though. “I can’t now,” he says when I ask about whether he’d considered going Full Sheeran. “It’d just be, like, another redheaded guy looping.” (This is a theme, by the way: In 2019, Morris played Sheeran’s “The A Team” for an American Idol audition, and apparently judge Katy Perry’s immediate reaction was to wonder why the world needed another Ed Sheeran. The question evidently stuck in his mind.)

Morris eventually dropped out of college and moved to Nashville, hoping to make it not as an artist but as a songwriter. He got a manager and started hanging out and writing songs with friends, including John Harvie, a singer-songwriter who went viral on TikTok in 2020 covering and writing pop-punk songs of his own. Through Harvie, Morris met people like Lynn Oliver-Cline, who runs a music management and publishing company called River House Artists.

“He had just been hustling,” Oliver-Cline remembers, “working different jobs and sleeping on different couches.” Morris showed her some of the stuff he was writing, and she offered him a gig as a full-time songwriter at their first meeting.

“Once I got signed as a songwriter,” Morris says, “it was like, dream accomplished, baby!” His full-time job was to create songs with and for other artists, which often means making a simple version of the track — known as a demo — and shopping it to artists who might be interested. Morris needed to make some demos, so in early 2022, he called up Becker, then just a producer and writer he’d met a few times in Nashville circles, and said he had a few songs he’d love some help recording. Becker also happened to live in Ohio, which meant Morris could go home and see his family. So he spent a couple of weeks in Columbus staying at Becker’s house — well, technically, Becker’s parents’ house.

“We were in his mom’s literal basement,” Morris says, “and we made seven songs.”

The songs weren’t finished or polished because they were only supposed to be demos to play for other artists. Morris took them back to Nashville and showed them to Oliver-Cline. “I just wanted to look like a good boy to my publisher,” Morris remembers, “and be like, ‘I have songs!’” He hadn’t written them for anyone in particular, but he liked them, and thought maybe he and River House could shop them around.

Morris and Oliver-Cline both remember what happened next in exactly the same way. Morris played the seven songs. Oliver-Cline laughed at him and told him he was nuts.

“Do you understand what you’ve done?” Oliver-Cline said to Morris. “If you think I would let you give those songs to someone else, you are out of your mind.”

Morris had never seriously thought about being an artist. He was just an Ed Sheeran knockoff, remember? But he also knew chances like this don’t often come around again. And besides, Oliver-Cline was pretty clear about how this was all going to go.

“You are putting these sounds out.”

The TikTok that made Morris a star is, in retrospect, not a particularly good TikTok. Morris wasn’t a content creator — he only started his account after Oliver-Cline encouraged him to use the platform to test out his songs. “They were like, ‘Let’s make an account, and just start posting one song; if nothing happens, you don’t have to put out any other ones.’”

By 2022, TikTok was already at the epicenter of the music industry. That was the year Lizzo’s “About Damn Time” rode a dance trend to a No. 1 spot on the Billboard charts, and everyone was singing the alphabet thanks to Gayle’s “abcdefu.” That year, Nina Webb, then the head of marketing at Atlantic Records, told NPR that TikTok was the only music platform “that will individually move the dial the way it does.” Sure, you could still have a music career without a TikTok account — but why do things the hard way?

That July, Morris went on vacation with his family to a lake in Tennessee. “I have a huge extended family,” he says, “so there’s, like, 50 of us.” Morris started posting TikToks throughout the week, all roughly the same thing: him on the deck of the lake house or on the dock by the water, doing something or other over a snippet of a song he’d written called “Sneakers.” He posted a bunch of them over the next few days.

One of them changed everything. “I posted a video at, like, 11 in the morning and went down to the lake all day,” Morris says. “I came back upstairs, and the video was at, like, 900,000 views.” By the next day, as he was driving back to Nashville, it was at 2 million views. That day, he started getting recognized in public. Lots of people already knew all the words to “Sneakers.”

It gets wilder: A week or so later, Morris was in a bar in Nashville and spotted Jeffery Jordan, the lead singer of The Band Camino, across the room. The Band Camino is “Nashville royalty,” Morris says, and had long been one of his favorite acts. While he was freaking out with his friends about the celeb in the room, Jordan came over and tapped him on the shoulder. “Are you Knox?” he asked.

The two ended up talking and drinking together for a while, and it turned out Jordan had found “Sneakers” on TikTok and had acquired the Dropbox link to the rest of Morris’ EP. He liked it, and asked Morris if he wanted to come play some shows with The Band Camino. “I was like, ‘Yeah, dude, for sure,’” Morris remembers. Then he looks at me pointedly. “Keep in mind, I’ve never played a show in my life. But let’s run it, dude.”

Knox opened for The Band Camino on a run of concerts starting in September of 2022. And this, not a viral TikTok, was the real lucky break for Knox Morris. “The most important thing we ever did, that ever happened to me, was playing those shows,” he says. “The problem with TikTok is TikTok comes and it goes, and once you’re not doing those views, you’re gone. But at the exact same time I was on everyone’s phone for ‘Sneakers,’ I was being put in front of 2,000 real people every night for a week straight.” He’d stay late after every show, shaking hands and meeting people until security kicked him out.

“Sneakers,” and that first EP, brought him millions of streams on Spotify and elsewhere. It also got him a record deal — at one point he had 16 offers, Oliver-Cline remembers, but he ended up signing with Atlantic Records. Soon after, a poppy meta-reference of a track called “Not The 1975” became his first song to get real radio play, and the first to hit pop charts in the US. And that song, plus 15 new ones, became Going, Going, Gone. With the album came the tour. Knox Morris became simply Knox.

This is all an impossibly charmed story, the kind of thing that happens to only a lucky few creators and artists. For every Knox Morris, there are countless others who never get the algorithmic breaks or the rock star meet-cutes. Even the ones who do make it are often unprepared for what “making it” means: Lyor Cohen, the head of YouTube Music, once told me that many artists are “exhausted” by the new methods of hitting it big, and lamented how many wannabe musicians have been reduced to simply being a social media star.

Morris recognizes how lucky he’s been. Looking back, he’s grateful that his touring debut and his TikTok virality happened together — “They’d see me onstage and then go home and I’d be the first thing on their TikTok feed” — and thinks the only response to all this good fortune is to work even harder. He hasn’t been doing this long enough to have much sage veteran advice, but he is certain of one thing: a few thousand people in a room meant much more to his career than a few million people on the internet.

“The advice I have for any TikTok artist, dude, is get on the road and go play in front of real people, and honestly get your show chops up,” he says. “I’ve seen so many TikTokers that have a massive song, bigger than any of mine, and they step on a stage and they have no idea what to do.”

That said, he knows that in the modern music business you ignore TikTok at your own peril. “I cannot stand when I hear artists who are like, ‘Oh, I don’t want to make TikToks,’” he says. “It’s like, oh, then you don’t want to be an artist that bad. You just don’t want anyone to listen to your music.”

The key, both to making TikTok work for you and to keep it from driving you mad, is to treat it like a tool and to understand that the soundtrack matters most. “The focus of your TikTok should always be the music,” Morris says. “It doesn’t matter how sick of a video you make, it doesn’t matter how good it looks. If the song sucks, it doesn’t matter.”

At this point, Morris has a few hundred thousand followers, a few million streams, and enough juice to sell out shows for a thousand people at a time. He could stop here if he wanted. “I could do these-size rooms for the next 10 years,” he says. But if he wants to get bigger, to start playing arenas like Ed Sheeran? He needs to go back to TikTok, and needs to play it differently. He has to build an audience of people who care about him as much as they care about his music.

“You almost have to build this character,” Morris says, “and that’s something I’m still figuring out how to do. I wouldn’t say I’m struggling with it… but I’m learning. It doesn’t come super naturally.”

Morris doesn’t spend a lot of time thinking about his TikTok presence. He does use the app a lot — “My For You page is Kai Cenat, Marvel videos, basketball, and, like, dick jokes” — but relies on his girlfriend, Alicae, to figure out which trends and dance challenges he should be jumping on himself. As far as I can tell, there is but one kind of TikTok Morris just flat-out refuses to do: the ones where the performer stops the show to get a wide shot of the crowd, or do a trending dance in front of everybody mid-set. “I think those are horrifying,” he says. “When you’re doing that, you’re showing you’re more of a TikToker than you are a musician. And I want the focus to be the music, you know?”

It’s just before midnight, and Morris’ opening act, a band called The Wldlfe, is finishing their set. The band has been around for a while and is clearly hoping for a Knox-sized break soon. Jansen Hogan, the band’s lead singer, tells the audience to go to a site called SET.live to find their songs, and throughout their set I see people pull out their phones and follow the band on Spotify. It’s all a little transactional and cringe-inducing at times, but this appears to be what it takes to make it now. Maybe you’re always only one follower and stream away.

A few minutes later, Morris bounds back onto the stage. The room is now packed, and the crowd goes berserk for the lanky redhead in camo pants and a blue-and-white No. 22 jersey. For the next 90 or so minutes, he plays nearly all of his songs. He gets decent responses to songs from the new album, and room-sized singalongs for his TikTok hits.

The crowd is older than I’d guessed, with a lot of elder millennials in Something Corporate and Warped Tour shirts. I met a number of fans who found Knox on TikTok, like I did. But I also met a few who discovered him at those first The Band Camino shows, and others who stumbled across “Not The 1975” on the radio. A group of bros from Penn State partied in the balcony throughout the whole show, and excitedly pointed me to the one who heard Knox on a Spotify playlist and immediately shared him with everybody else.

“This is the biggest headline show I’ve ever played in my life,” Morris shouts to the audience early on, and reminds them that “this is our first show, guys!” when something goes wrong with a track a few minutes later.

A few things do go wrong, and at one point Morris apologizes to the crowd for relegating one of his most-loved songs to an acoustic part of the show. Later, this will become content for TikTok — clips of the audience singing his songs, clips of Morris playing songs fans requested by holding up signs, clips of Morris in the parking lot playing acoustic sets after the show. He’ll even end up posting one of those crowdwork videos he hates so much (and it’ll do numbers). Over the course of the next month on tour, Morris will post almost every day. He has to, and he knows it: if he wants to play arenas, to be the biggest star in the world, to go Full Ed Sheeran, he’ll always have to be both artist and creator.

But that’s tomorrow’s problem. For now, onstage, in front of a real audience of paying concert attendees, he just gets to be a rock star.