Joel Cross “Shake It Off” (Taylor Swift)

Cross, who is from Cleburne, has been playing music since he was 12 years old, getting his start in gospel music. He then went on to study at the University of Houston and UNT before teaching guitar for a few years. After realizing teaching guitar wasn’t something he wanted to do for the rest of his life, he began performing full time.

Here and there, people would randomly ask him to cover a Swift song. “People just love Taylor Swift and it just kept coming up and I was like, ‘This would be really funny if I actually did it,’ and I did,” he says. From there, Cross says he listened to the song while driving to a gig and figured out how to make it his own. “I sat down with the guitar and was just playing the chords until I found a groove I liked and then I just sang through the song and it just slowly developed.”

Today the video has more than 650,000 views on YouTube. Cross lists off some nice things he has read about the video, but says he tries not to read them all. “To be honest, I’m trying not to read all the comments. I don’t need to hear that,” he says. (Wise man.)