“I Ain’t Worried” has now doubled up its qualifications for the Spotify Billions Club. OneRepublic’s 2022 hit, which first appeared on the soundtrack to Top Gun: Maverick and returned on the band’s 2024 album Artificial Paradise, has surpassed 2 billion streams on the platform. It’s the second OneRepublic song to cross the 2 billion mark on Spotify following “Counting Stars.”
Here’s one fun fact about “I Ain’t Worried”: The song incorporates elements from “Young Folks,” Peter, Bjorn and John’s whistling indie-pop hit from 2006. Here’s another one: It features backing vocals from one of those young folks, frontman Ryan Tedder’s son Copeland, who is the only voice heard on the track besides his dad.
Tedder submitted “I Ain’t Worried” for the movie after star and producer Tom Cruise reportedly rejected 30 other songs. It soundtracks a beach scene early in the film when Cruise’s Maverick and other characters play football, providing a rare moment of levity. Tedder told The Wrap the vision that he pitched to Cruise: “The song needs to have levity, it needs to have some swag to it, ‘cause these guys are badass top guns. I want it to have a West Coast bent to it,” he said, referencing alt-pop acts like Gorillaz and Foster The People. Tedder, who has penned countless hits for other artists, originally did not realize the song he was writing would be recorded by his own group, but when given the opportunity he was happy to participate in the Top Gun phenomenon.
Initially, the band was not allowed to see the scene they were writing for due to the locked-down nature of the production process, but Tedder eventually got to attend an early screening and surreptitiously recorded the beach scene with his iPhone. He then threw his bootleg footage into the music production software Logic and wrote with the rhythm of the seaside football game in mind. Cruise found this tactic amusing and praised Tedder for his tenacity.
After its appearance in the movie, “I Ain’t Worried” took off on TikTok, which eventually led to radio airplay and streaming success, as the new Spotify milestone confirms.
Buy OneRepublic’s “I Ain’t Worried” on vinyl now.
