John Fogerty has written some of the most instantly recognisable songs in rock’n’roll history. After all, what’s a wedding reception without Proud Mary or a Vietnam War film that leaves Fortunate Son off the soundtrack? But on a bright, blustery winter’s day in Manhattan, the question is not whether anyone can recognise the hits of the Creedence Clearwater Revival singer. It’s if Fogerty can recognise those of anyone else.
Fogerty is here to be a guest on Track Star, an online show with an endearingly straightforward premise: its host, Jack Coyne, cues up a song and contestants win $5 if they can name the artist. If they are correct they can go double-or-nothing until they lose it all or decide to tap out.
What started as a civilians-on-the-street series has evolved into a top stop on the American celebrity promo trail. Stars give their controversial opinions on Subway Takes; have awkward, flirty chats on Chicken Shop Date; and flex their music knowledge on Track Star, basking in a shared passion for their favourite deep cuts.
“At the end, do I get like, $27 or something?” Fogerty asks with a smile just before filming starts. “Can I buy a vowel?”
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Coyne begins the quiz with Blue Moon by Elvis Presley, then Chuck Berry’s Maybellene. The Beatles’ I Saw Her Standing There sparks Fogerty to tell his tale of meeting George Harrison in 1987, complete with an excellent Harrison impression. “I was kind of stunned,” Fogerty says. “Standing there with” – he goes full Liverpool – “a Beat-le!” Looking to the sky, he cries out, “Thank you, George!”
The next track – Pete Seeger, John Brown’s Body – draws Fogerty back to his youth. When he was 12, Fogerty and his mother went to Berkeley Folk Festival, where he met Seeger, who played Where Have All the Flowers Gone? “That song had a huge impact on me,” Fogerty says. “I still think that’s a wonderful statement on the folly of war.”
Coyne asks: “Is that when you decided to become a songwriter? Just from your mom playing you those records?”
“What I remember is my first song,” Fogerty says. This original composition from his childhood was a bluesy take on an ad for laundry soap, with a Muddy Waters riff. Right there in the street, Fogerty breaks into song: “Dun-da-duh-dun-DUN: Oh I’ve got the wash day blues! Dun-da-duh-dun-DUN. I got so many clothes I got to wash!”
Coyne’s face splits into an enormous smile; he looks as if he’s mentally filing away the moment as an episode highlight, one that might find its way on to a TikTok or Instagram feed. He built the playlist for Fogerty almost as if he were making a mixtape: Coyne listened to Fogerty’s oeuvre and dug around for clues Fogerty had dropped in other interviews that signalled there’s probably a story there. Here was preparation’s pay-off.
“We are tricking people into telling a story,” Coyne explains. “They’re listening to something, they get fired up and then they get to talk about it.”
“It’s a sophisticated trick,” says David Remnick, editor of the New Yorker magazine, who is another recent guest. “He’s making you tell a little bit about yourself and your life and your obsessions and your pleasures, maybe your heartbreaks.”
The show seems to have thoroughly charmed him. “It is, in this ugly world, a relief and a pleasure to see people talking about what makes them feel something very deeply.”
Coyne, who is 34, his 31-year-old brother Kieran, and a friend, Henry Kornaros, who’s 26, founded their media company, Public Opinion, in 2022, when man-on-the-street videos were starting to take off on social platforms. Most of those efforts were either obviously staged or uncomfortably aggressive.
“We wanted to make stuff that would hopefully make you smarter as opposed to add to the noise of ‘gotcha’ videos and pranks,” Kieran Coyne says.
They first attempted a New York City trivia gameshow. It was a bust. They’d wait around forever for someone to volunteer to play. “And then they would know nothing,” Kornaros says. So in early 2023 they pivoted to a topic many knew, loved and could get excited about: music.
At first, they just chatted up regular people. Celebrities soon wanted in on the action. Olivia Rodrigo, who in 2024 became one of the first big artists on Track Star, half-seriously called the game “the most anxiety-inducing interview I’ve ever done”.
More big names followed: Charli XCX, David Byrne, Elmo. Coyne estimates that about 60 per cent of guests are stars; the others are regular people. Four months ago, a Gen X-er named Sue Molnar won $10,000. “I’m going to have to pay you in instalments,” Coyne joked during the episode.
The celebrities on Track Star were all pitched by their own teams, Coyne says. He estimates they get “about 100 pitches a week” and have to turn most people down.
Some politicians ask in, too. In an appearance during his campaign for mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani nailed a string of city anthems (No Sleep ’Til Brooklyn; New York, New York) only to whiff on Billy Joel’s New York State of Mind.
Kamala Harris came on in 2024 during her presidential-election campaign, to rhapsodise about Stevie Wonder, Miles Davis and Roy Ayers, and to assert her Track Star fandom. “I love what you do,” she told Coyne.
But Coyne says politicians generally make for lousy guests. They’re too on-message and they don’t tell good stories. “Even Zohran,” he says. “It’s not that interesting.”
With artists, there’s hope for candour. The standard press junket can look, from a certain point of view, like a humiliation ritual. Even big stars can’t escape tap-dancing for the algorithm: taking the lie-detector tests, competing in snack wars, reacting to memes. That’s all well and goofy; the virality gods must have their sacrifices. Real moments of curiosity and vulnerability can be pretty hard to find, but upon hearing their favourite song, even the hottest artist typically opens up.
Back at the Public Opinion office in NoHo, a smattering of the company’s seven employees are working with headphones on, tuning out the sound of building construction that hints at bigger aspirations. Some viewers spot Track Star clips on TikTok or Instagram Reels, but Coyne says his team’s focus is on longer-form YouTube videos. Most episodes are between 10 and 15 minutes; others stretch to nearly an hour. According to Coyne, nearly 70 per cent of the Track Star audience is older than 35 and most watch on YouTube, primarily on their TVs.
“We talk about going deeper, going wider, going more frequently,” Coyne says. Track Star has begun posting documentary-style explorations of pop punk, Chess Records and movie scores that near or exceed an hour in length. Coyne says the company aims to be the music-centric storytelling hub for a digital age, “playful and silly and fun” but also “educational”. “How MTV was thought of in the 1980s,” he says. “That’s what we want to create, or recreate.”
After filming his episode, Fogerty reflects on his experience. “It was just startling to me, how much that music meant to me, those songs that were played for me, and the way Jack talked about them,” he says. “It was presented as a quite honourable endeavour, you know what I mean? He wasn’t joking. I think he took it seriously – and so did I.” – This article originally appeared in the New York Times
