Miles Bonham, the 8-year-old internet sensation who is more widely known as Miles Music Kid, has taken an important step on the road to a proper career in the music business – he’s released his first single.
You Can Be A Hero is released through Republic Records and is to be featured on the soundtrack to the upcoming superhero movie Ryan’s World The Movie: Titan Universe Adventure.
Young Miles has garnered over 2.7 million Instagram followers and 1.2 million TikTok followers by demonstrating an understanding of musical composition and production far beyond his tender years. He fully wrote, arranged and produced the single, playing all of the instruments on the recording himself.
And as you can hear, it’s no novelty, but a pop song with a fine melody that’s free of the gimmicky production touches that adults might have put in. Indeed, with its key change two thirds of the way in, it’s kinda sweetly old-fashioned.
“As soon as I saw the movie, I knew I needed to make a banger that would make not just kids, but everybody want to dance and inspire them to know that anyone can be a hero,” Miles said in a statement.
You can watch Miles taking you through the writing and recording process of the song in the video at the top of the page. Here, he shows you how he worked out the chords, recorded the guitar and bass, tweaked his plugins and added the rest of the parts in Logic Pro.
Oh, and he shows you his tree house, too.
You may remember Miles from a story we ran on him last year when he was taken for a tour of Electric Lady, the iconic New York studio which has been frequented by generations of music legends, from Hendrix to Bowie to Kendrick Lamar. Miles did a bit more than look around – he knocked up a quick cover of Mac Ayres’ Easy, playing among other things a drumkit used by Questlove of the Roots and a Fender Rhodes that Stevie Wonder had gifted to the studio.
It was his first experience in a recording studio and at the time he remarked: “I could stay here for two weeks and not get bored.”
If You Can Be A Hero reaches the Billboard Hot 100 it would make Miles the youngest artist to write, produce and arrange a chart hit. Alas, he has already been beaten to the accolade of youngest chart artist – that resides with Blue Ivy Carter, daughter of Beyonce and Jay Z. Mum and dad allowed her a feature on their 2012 hit Glory when she was less than two years old.
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