The album was originally released in 2014 but has received a recent surge in attention through the revival phenomenon that began with Heidi Montag, who also lost her house in the devastating wildfires
Ten years ago, Leighton Meester was on the road for the Heartstrings tour. The actress had released her debut album a few months prior, and the run of live shows supporting it kept her away from home for eight weeks as she performed for hundreds of fans each night. A lot has changed since then. Meester hasn’t released music in more than a decade and just last week her Los Angeles home burned down in the wildfires that have ravaged the city. But her fanbase recently reactivated to revive Heartstrings online as a show of support.
Heartstrings is currently sitting at Number 21 on the iTunes all-genre album chart, a few spaces above Taylor Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department, Post Malone’s F-1 Trillion, and Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits. And her single “Your Love’s a Drug,” released in 2010, has cracked the iTunes songs chart. Purchasing albums and songs, as opposed to streaming, directs more revenue to songwriters and artists. Meester notably wrote Heartstrings on her own.
The resurgence was led by TikTok users hoping to replicate the boost they recently gave Heidi Montag, who also lost her home in the wildfires and saw a decade-old album reach the top of the iTunes chart earlier this week. “Can the internet also do what it did for Heidi Montag’s underrated music from over a decade ago to Leighton Meester’s underappreciated bops?” one user, Gibson Johns, wrote in a video set to the Meester deep cut “Summer Girl.” “Her house also burned down and this music deserves its moment in the sun!!!”
One of the most vocal supporters of the iTunes revival as disaster resource strategy is Flavor Flav. The rapper has shared eight separate videos set to Montag’s single “I’ll Do It” and recently shifted his focus to backing Meester. “Starting to hype up my girl Leighton Meester and help her family recover from the fire,” he wrote in a post set to “Somebody to Love.” In the caption, he added: “Stream @LeightonMeester Somebody to Love and use the song in yo TikTok’s.”
Meester lived in her Pacific Palisades home with husband Adam Brody and their two children.
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