PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — A Montgomery County teenager is getting some attention for a Christmas song she wrote with her dad. Now the song, which was released as a video using iPhone footage, seems to have struck a chord with hundreds of thousands of people.
15-year-old Wallis Schriver of Jenkintown, who goes by the stage name Wallis, said she and her dad wrote "Lonely Christmas" based on what they were feeling during quarantine.
"We had little ideas throughout the year but we never fully executed them and then we decided that we gotta get this song going and then we whipped it together in two weeks," she said, "and we intended the song to have a hopeful message."
Her younger sisters, who sing backup harmonies, are also featured in the video visiting their grandparents, separated by their front door. Schriver said they used to spend a lot of time with them.
"Being in quarantine, we had not had an opportunity to do that," she said. "We try to visit them as much as possible. We stand kind of far away and we'll have our conversations from a distance."
It took a single day to shoot the video on iPhone. From there, it was a matter of finding someone to edit.
"We have a friend who does video editing as a job and he offered to quickly put the video together for us," she said. "We sent it to him the same day we filmed it and he just worked with the clips that we got."
Since the song was posted at the beginning of the month, Schriver said it's taken off.
"Somebody posted it on Reddit and then from there, my views on YouTube started going up," she detailed. "Then it was trending on Reddit and I got more views on my Instagram as well, and I got messages from a lot of different musicians and record labels."
The Ellen DeGeneres Show and Today even reached out. Said Schriver, "I'm still in shock."