AN Irish singer who gave up on her career has told how a song for her late nephew propelled her to the big time years after she had given up – with a little help from social media. Stephanie Rainey, 36, went viral back in 2015 with nearly 2million views on her Please Don’t Go music video, but after it “never really reached its full potential”, and after being dropped by her label, she was ready to ditch music for good. But after it blew up TikTok years later, the Cork mum ended up reaching the quarter-finals of America’s Got Talent and hit No2 in the US charts.
She told the Irish Sun: “Not a lot of artists like me get a shot at a second chance at things. "You get your moment and then if it passes, it’s hard to get that back.” The song is about grief and was written after her nephew passed away.
Fionn died a day after his first birthday of meningitis when Stephanie herself was just a teenager. She said of the aftermath: “Everyone’s life moves on around you as it naturally should. But yours is completely different.
"And it’s like trying to find a connection in that . . .
I feel like there’s a massive void and a massive loneliness there.” She added: “I think people feel almost like there’s like a timescale to where they can talk about people that they’ve lost, where they don’t want to burden people with it. “What I found with Please Don’t Go is like it seems to be a place that people go where they’re like, ‘Somebody wrote this, that un.