Stadium shows, Billboard chart records, awards—Teddy Swims has achieved it all. But for the singer, the moment he knew he’d truly “made it” came when he collaborated with The Wiggles.
Swims is wrapping up an action-packed tour of Australia and New Zealand, performing at the NRL Grand Final, delivering a keynote at SXSW Sydney, and, yes, sharing the stage with the iconic children’s group.
This morning, Swims appeared on Nova 100’s Jase & Lauren to discuss life Down Under, his tattoo obsession, and realizing his dream as an unofficial Wiggle.
The Wiggles joined Teddy Swims onstage at Sydney’s Qudos Bank Arena on Oct. 15 for a medley of “Rock-A-Bye Your Bear,” “Hot Potato,” and “Fruit Salad.”
“Yeah, that was the coolest thing ever,” he said. “So, I reached out to them years ago when I first started coming up on Instagram, because they’re really my heroes growing up, and always wanted to collab with them. And so I reached out to them, like, ‘you’re my heroes. I love you’.”
Swims got his chance to meet the children’s entertainers backstage on the Today Show, ahead of the Oct. 5 rugby league finale.
“I met them in the hallway, and they were like, ‘you want to play ‘Fruit Salad’ with us?’ And I was like, ‘oh my god!’… I was absolutely starstruck.”
He then invited The Wiggles to join him at a concert, which they did.
“Oh dude, it was so sick,” Swims recalled. “We did this whole three song medley, and the whole band was involved. It was the coolest thing ever. I think it was, like, I even said it afterwards, that was my ‘made it’ moment for me.”
Swims has plenty of career highlights. In July, “Lose Control” made history as the first song on the Billboard Hot 100 to spend 100 weeks on the chart. The previous record-holder was Glass Animals’ “Heat Waves,” which spent 91 weeks in 2021-22.
The Atlanta-born singer’s mix of R&B, country, and soul has also performed strongly in Australia. In January, Swims’ I’ve Tried Everything But Therapy (Part 2) debuted at No. 1 on the ARIA Albums Chart, while “Lose Control” reached No. 4 on the national singles chart.
On Australian breakfast radio, Swims admitted he’s “running out of space” for tattoos, though his friends provide plenty of blank canvases.
“Right before my son was born,” he explained, “I was trying to take a couple months off the booze and so we’d always have kind of party after the show in the green room and stuff, there’s so many people. So I was like, instead of fighting the urge to drink, I could just pull the tattoo machine out and all the drunks would just let me tattoo them.”