Every so often a scene realizes it is quietly missing someone. This is one of those notices. Where, exactly, is Tai Verdes? The man who turned a Verizon Wireless sales floor into a Gold- and Platinum-certified recording career on nothing but charm and optimism, and whom pop could genuinely use right about now.
The story that felt impossible
Born Tyler James Colon, Verdes auditioned unsuccessfully for both American Idol and The Voice, seven rejections in total, before a thousand-likes TikTok dare in 2020 changed everything. Stuck in the Middle and its 2021 successor A-O-K carried him from the sales floor to a deal with Arista Records, discovered mid-breakout by McClain Portis of Live2. It was the defining feel-good story of the TikTok-to-major-label era.
The optimist the algorithm forgot
Verdes built his whole appeal on transparent, diary-style documentation of his own rise, an artist who let you watch the whole thing happen and never once pretended to be too cool for it. Across the TV, HDTV and 4K trilogy, that unguarded optimism was the product. It is also exactly the thing a jaded, doom-scrolling music culture is short on in 2026.
The world needs its Spider-Man. The scene, quietly, needs its Tai Verdes.
The legend, for the record
Remember how good the story was. Before the Verizon floor, Tyler James Colon won a $50,000 prize on a reality dating show that funded his move to Los Angeles, and stands 6'7" from a life once pointed at professional basketball. When Stuck in the Middle hit, McClain Portis of Live2 got him on a call while he was still working the counter, taking it between customers. Rather than lean on one produced clip, Verdes built roughly 80 videos in a continuing story arc, pushing the song from a thousand streams a day to three hundred thousand. The New York Times named it one of the best songs of 2020. That is the machinery underneath the optimism, and it is exactly the kind of self-built, transparent come-up the current moment has stopped producing.
A case for the return
This is not a eulogy. It is a request. The pipeline that produced Verdes has kept spinning, but few who came through it carried his particular gift for making optimism sound cool instead of naive. So consider this an open letter to a Verizon-store success story: the algorithm moved on, the scene got heavier, and the case for the return of pop's great optimist writes itself. Come back, Tai. The timing is perfect.