About ily (i love you baby) [feat. Emilee]

"Ily (I Love You Baby)" (stylized in all lowercase) is a song by American producer Surf Mesa featuring vocals by Emilee Flood. It was first released on November 26, 2019. When the song was re-released through Astralwerks and Universal in February 2020, it started gaining popularity through user-generated clips on the app TikTok. The song has since reached the top 10 in Austria, Germany, the Netherlands and Switzerland, as well as the top 40 in Australia, Belgium (Flanders and Wallonia), the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, France, Ireland, Lithuania, New Zealand, Norway and Slovakia. The song lyrically samples the 1967 song "Can't Take My Eyes Off You" by Frankie Valli and The Four Seasons.

On March 3, the electronic producer Surf Mesa’s single “ily” debuted on Spotify’s Global Viral chart, which highlights songs benefitting from a recent surge in interest. The track merged an acoustic cover of the Sixties classic “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You,” originally recorded by Franki Valli, with a downtempo, four-on-the-floor beat. Four weeks later, the song made it to Spotify’s Top 200 — which currently requires more than 700,000 streams a day — and it had gained an appendage: The title was now “ily (i love you baby).” “We found that because of the way it was titled, ‘ily,’ the search terms ‘Surf Mesa I Love You’ weren’t finding the song,” explains Toby Andrews, general manager of the label Astralwerks. “So we went in and changed the title to add ‘I Love You Baby’ to make it easier for people to find. Now that’s a practice we’re looking into for other records of ours — things that have good traction behind them, but maybe the title doesn’t necessarily match the theme of the song that people are looking for.” Today’s fast-moving viral hits face several challenges. The first and most important hurdle remains sample clearance: Singles often become popular among young online listeners before the legal matters are buttoned up. When Natalie Dodge, Astralwerks’ senior director of A&R, noticed “ily” beginning to move, she had to find a way to clear both the vocal sample — ripped from another popular TikTok user without permission — and the original “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You” composition. Bringing Surf Mesa into the fold was “the most challenging signing I’ve done,” Dodge says.