She Was Always Compared to Taylor Swift Growing Up. Then a Cover of One of Her Songs Blew Up Her Music Career (Exclusive)

Gray Connors started playing guitar when she was 8 — because of her "idol" Taylor Swift

NEED TO KNOW

• While Connors had always loved music, she knew pursuing a career in the industry would be difficult

• However, after posting a video of herself singing Swift's song "The Fate of Ophelia" — Connors got an overwhelming amount of comparisons to the singer, prompting the viral takeoff of her social media singing career

Taylor Swift is the reason thatGray Connors, 22, ultimately started playing guitar when she was just 8 years old."I heard her songs in the car off my dad's iPod Nano, and I was like, 'I love this. I'm obsessed,'" she tells PEOPLE. Young Connors immediately downloaded all of her music and, in true young-Taylor fashion, asked for a guitar for her birthday."I started songwriting then as well, but very inconsistently. I think I always knew that I wanted to do music, but I have a lot of doubt or I had a lot of doubt in my mind, like, 'Oh, that's a really hard career to do, obviously,'" she said.

Connors grew up, went to boarding school and then college, and, as she puts it, "life just got busy." She put music and her pursuit of it on the back burner.When she graduated from Loyola Marymount University in 2025, Connors found herself facing the age-old question of what she wanted to do with her life. Despite the narrative that she had heard circulating that music was a hard career to get into, there was one thing that spurred Connors to get over her hesitation to pursue her dream."The fear of regret," Connors says. "For many years, I've lived with this feeling of: 'I want to do music, but I'm doubting myself.'""I think I would go the rest of my life feeling like what if, having the question of what if I didn't do it," she adds.

She began posting covers online. Herfirst viral videowas a clip of her comparing the melody of Swift's hit from her latest album,The Life of a Showgirl,"The Fate of Ophelia," to one of Swift's other classics, "Say Don't Go." The video quickly racked up one million views and hundreds of comments comparing the young singer's voice to her pop superstar "idol.""That completely blew up, and then I posted a bunch more and those also blew up, and so I was like, 'Oh, maybe I do have a shot at this,'" she says. Online, Connors has nearly 250,000 followers on her multiple TikTok accounts. Her videos, especially her Swift covers, frequently rack up millions of views.However, Connors herself doesn't necessarily pick up on the comparisons that her followers make to the "You Belong With Me" singer."It's interesting because I was told it a little bit when I was younger, but I'm like, 'Oh, well, she's [like] Taylor Swift.' She's my idol. I don't believe that. When people compliment you ... for me, at least, I don't believe what people say a lot of the time. I have to feel it myself."

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"Since it's me and I'm so familiar with my voice and hers, I could hear the differences so easily, and I think people that have listened to my voice for some time, they pick up on the nuances. The more you listen to me, the more you realize that I sound less like her."Connors' music career also has soft parallels to Swift's own early trajectory. "When I was really little, I started writing about friendships. I was having a hard time there, my little eight-year-old self, so I wrote songs about that," she says."But then when I was 17, I went through my 17-year-old, really sad breakup, so I started writing pretty intensely then again," she continues. "And then that breakup lasted a few years, just the feelings lingering and all that, so I wrote a lot of songs about that, and that helped me get through that."Connors also reflects on Swift's own early career."You watch the documentaries of when she was really little and how it started and how she just went around giving her CDs to labels and performing everywhere she could," she recalls. "I think I'm shyer than that. I'm a little bit more anxious than that, so I really have to push myself to take leaps like that and to work through the anxiety because I know that it's something I want. So I think that's the biggest differentiator between my childhood and my beginnings and hers. She really just went for it. I have to push myself a little bit more."After the success of her viral videos, Connors says that followers were asking for original music.

"I had made a song just as a passion project back in 2022, and I showed people that," she says. "I didn't really intend for that to be my debut song or really anything to come of it at all. It was just released to family and friends. I put people on that song just because that's all I had, and people loved it. So as of October, around six months ago, I have decided that I wanted to do this full-time."The passion project, a song called "These Days" was — like many things in Connor's career — "openly inspired" by Swift. Namely, the "instrumentation" has influences from the song "Red" off of Swift's 2012 album of the same name, she says."That was my favorite era. I wanted to make a song that sounded like that because it was just a passion project for me, and like I said, it was getting me through a hard time," she explains. "Songwriting, it was like a blessing in disguise because it brought me back to songwriting intensely and really doing that, and so I'm glad that happened."

She was a marketing major in college, originally working to find some avenue into music marketing ("to combine my major with my passion"). Now, she says, she's using her schooling to advertise herself online. For Connors, who is pursuing music full-time now, "every day looks different." Connors admits it's challenging, as she's always thrived on routine. Her days are filled with songwriting and vocal practice, as well as side gigs like walking dogs, babysitting and user-generated content."Honestly, random things, anything that will help me make some money so I can keep focusing on music," she laughs."I think I'm trying to find a balance right now," she says. "But I 100% will continue with the social media because that's where I've gone to where I have now. The music industry has completely transformed in that it is so centered around social media, so I have to keep up with that no matter what.""And I think I have an advantage over some other artists because I am so social media savvy. I make a lot of edits and I go live a lot, which isn't necessarily going to be the game changer, but I feel like it caters to my community and it helps me connect with fans. I will definitely continue with social media and keep going hard there."

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