An emotional Wyatt Flores, who has been open about his own struggles with mental health on and off the stage over the past year, performed an unreleased song on the topic Wednesday night at the Grand Ole Opry, dedicating it to his fans and acknowledging the late Aubreigh Wyatt.
Playing the Opry for the second time during his quick rise to country-music prominence, the 23-year-old Flores sang “Please Don’t Go” — his 2022 viral hit that led to nearly all the success he has had since — for the second tune in his four-song set. “Please Don’t Go” is written as a plea to a loved one not to take their life.
Flores then played a song called “Oh, Susannah,” which has not been released on any platform thus far, including Half Life, the eight-song EP he dropped in April. In the lyrics, the narrator is speaking to an unnamed person who has presumably taken their life. The refrain of the chorus ends with, “Thought I was a savior/but I was a fool on drunken behavior. Why did I believe, that I could save you, darling/Without killing me?”
Aubreigh Wyatt was a 13-year-old girl in southern Mississippi who died in the late summer of 2023. Her death — which occurred shortly after Flores’s maternal grandfather took his life while Flores was on tour — was ruled a suicide by medical examiners. One of the last posts on a TikTok account in Aubreigh Wyatt’s name featured her singing along to “Please Don’t Go.” In recent weeks, a series of viral social media posts dedicated to her have also resurfaced with Flores’s song.
Before the refrain in “Oh, Susannah,” Flores stopped playing and — fighting back tears — addressed the crowd at the Opry House.
“I’ve been getting tagged in a lot of things, and I’ve been struggling with how to bring this up,” Flores said from the stage. “I usually don’t want to bring it up, but for the amount of people that keep asking me… I’ll bring it up. Aubreigh Wyatt was a young girl who committed suicide last year. And I remember being in Colorado in October when I seen a TikTok of her mom talking about it, and they said that she liked my music. I sent my condolences. Now, there’s a whole bunch of stuff popping back up over the entire thing because she was bullied. They keep asking me to do something about it…because the last video she had posted on TikTok was her singing, ‘Please Don’t Go.’
“I had to step away from music earlier this year, because of a lot of different reasons,” he continued. “One of those was feeling the weight of the world from trying to help people but not feeling like I was. As cool as it is that I get to do this…and the music that I portray, it gets to save lives. But, there’s also the dark side of it, where you don’t know if that song just kept them on Earth just a couple of days longer.
“I did not write that song, ‘Please Don’t Go,’ for everybody out there in the world. I wrote it because of the situation that I was in with a girl that I loved. But, this song is for y’all. ‘Oh, Susannah’ is you. I wrote this for you. And I’m sorry.”
The crowd broke into applause and followed it with a standing ovation when Flores left the stage.
Flores is four months removed from a self-imposed mental health break that took him off the road and out of the studio for four weeks. In February, he broke down in tears onstage during a show in Kansas City, Missouri, telling the crowd his dreams were coming true but he felt completely numb. In the time between his grandfather’s death and his break, he often spoke from the stage about suicide and the importance of seeking help. In addition to “Please Don’t Go,” Flores released a cover of the Fray’s “How to Save a Life,” part of the Half Life EP.
The native Oklahoman was named to the 2024 class of Opry NextStage. His performance on Wednesday night followed a four-song set by 49 Winchester, fellow members of the Opry NextStage class whom Flores cites as one of the biggest influences of his career. On August 16, Flores and 49 Winchester will co-headline a show at Whitewater Amphitheater in New Braunfels, Texas.
Across Canada, country music is synonymous with gatherings. It lives in the dust of a summer rodeo, the sticky floor of a neighborhood dive bar and the reverberating rafters of an arena filled with thousands of voices singing back every word. While most of the music industry spent the last decade adapting to a digital-first reality, country music continues to derive its power from physical spaces.
Taylor Swift and Bad Bunny in a split image
Taylor Swift and Bad Bunny Dealt With Trump Quietly. It’s a Smart Move
Taylor Swift and Bad Bunny are both major superstars — and they’ve shared some parallels in their careers and discographies for several years. Now, they’re even using the same playbook to deal with taunts and baiting from Donald Trump and the White House’s social media teams.
Since Trump took office during his second term, he and his administration have been using social media as part of their communication strategy. The propaganda-like, rage-bait-style clips often lean into internet culture and use popular music to make light of Trump’s most egregious actions, like his immigration policy and war-hungry foreign policy.
Olivia Rodrigo, Katy Perry, Ariana Grande, and Noah Kahan are just some of the artists who have had their music used in these videos without their permission — and vehemently spoken out against these actions and against the president. In the past couple of weeks, the Trump administration seems to have wanted to provoke a response from two of the world’s biggest superstars: Bad Bunny and Swift.
On July 30, the official White House TikTok used “La Mudanza” for a particularly tone-deaf video about immigration that celebrated the number of deportations under Trump. A week later, a video with text that said, “mood because it’s August and Donald Trump is your president” set to Swift’s “August” was uploaded by Team Trump, the president’s official campaign account. The caption was an overt provocation: “I’m sure Taylor Swift is going to be super excited we used her song,” it read. Days later, another clip from the same account featured an edited version of Swift’s Red album cover with text that said, “Did you know that Taylor Swift wrote a whole album about the color of the Republican Party?”
Neither musician has released a public statement denouncing the use of their music in Trump’s videos. Instead, two of the world’s biggest superstars quietly removed their songs from videos posted by official accounts linked to the Trump administration. (It’s unclear if there is a TikTok feature that allows selective sound muting on videos or if the respective teams reached out to the social media accounts directly.) The tracks are still available for other TikTok accounts to use in their videos, making their silence a pointed — and smart — approach. Both Bad Bunny and Swift seem to recognize the president and his administration’s tactics for what they are: antagonizing moves that keep the Trump conversation centered on his social media presence, rather than his actual policies and the harm they commit. Why would they add their star power to the conversation and stoke the flames when that’s exactly what the White House appears to want?
Some people argue that celebrities should wield their platform to denounce Trump at any chance if they are truly not politically aligned with his MAGA politics. But because they hold so much influence, these superstars need to be strategic about how they use it.
Benito, in particular, has been incredibly outspoken about his politics. He stood on two of the world’s biggest stages and used them to voice pro-immigration messages, denounce Trump’s policies, and highlight Puerto Rico as it struggles with the effects of U.S. imperialism. “Before I say, ‘Thank God,’ I’m going to say, ‘ICE out,’” the Puerto Rican superstar said at the 2026 Grammys. “We’re not savage. We’re not animals. We’re not aliens. We are humans and we are Americans.” Last summer, Bad Bunny’s music video for “Nuevayol” used a voice that sounds a lot like the president’s to deliver a pro-immigrant message. “I made a mistake. I want to apologize to the immigrants in America. I mean the United States. I know America is the whole continent,” the voice bellows out of a Seventies radio toward the end of the video. “I want to say that this country is nothing without the immigrants.”
Fans were convinced that Benito would speak out against the official White House TikTok account when it used one of his most political songs. But commenting on the video would only blow up the discussion for a wider audience. When Rodrigo, Perry, Grande, and Kahan made public comments, spokespeople for the White House used the opportunity to spread hateful rhetoric. “We’ll say this one last time: what’s actually barbaric, inhumane, and heinous are the criminal illegal aliens who have injured and murdered innocent American citizens,” Abigail Jackson said in a statement to Rolling Stone after Grande spoke out. It’s the antithesis of what Benito said during his Grammys speech this year: “The only thing more powerful than hate is love.”
Swift, on the other hand, has dealt with Trump and the right-wing’s instigations for years, each one crazier than the last. The TikTok videos from the last week aren’t even the first time that the administration has used the singer’s music for social media videos. Last fall, both the official White House TikTok account and Team Trump used songs from Swift’s then-newly released The Life of a Showgirl in separate videos. One plucked the lyrics “pledge allegiance to your hands, your team, your vibes” from “The Fate of Ophelia” to celebrate Trump, Vice President JD Vance, and the first and second ladies. The others boasted about Trump by using “Father Figure” and honored Melania Trump’s Patriot of the Year award with “Opalite.” As of Aug. 10, the audio is not available under all of these specific videos.
The pop superstar has not spoken publicly about these instances. But she has made her disdain for Trump clear. Over the years, Swift has criticized Trump’s autocratic leadership. On X, she wrote “we will vote you out” and endorsed Joe Biden and Kamala Harris in the 2020 and 2024 elections, respectively. In 2019, Swift told Rolling Stone, “There’s literally nothing worse than white supremacy. It’s repulsive. There should be no place for it.”
Even though she’s shared her liberal viewpoints on issues like abortion, LGBTQ+ rights, and racial inequality, Swift has still faced ridiculous claims of being MAGA-aligned and folding in right-wing dog whistles to her music — and that’s without ever naming Trump. If Swift were to make a statement about her music being used by the Trump administration, the attention-seeking president would absolutely revel in it. Getting Swift and Bad Bunny to weigh in is exactly the type of headline grabber he would love to draw attention from his remarkably unpopular presidency.