You could’ve guessed there’d be another superhero flick at the multiplex this summer: DC’s “Supergirl.” And it wouldn’t be at all weird for a Nashville musician to show up in the credits.
But here’s one detail that probably wasn’t on your bingo card: The movie features a slowed-down version of the Jimmy Eat World hit “The Middle,” performed by a violinist, singer and recent grad from a different middle — Middle Tennessee State University.
Some background on the original version of the song: “The Middle” arrived 25 years ago this month on the Jimmy Eat World album “Bleed American.” The band had previously been dropped from their label for meh sales of their third album, but this one wound up going platinum, partly on the strength of “The Middle,” which today has over a billion plays on Spotify.
The album landed in the year 2001. It was the same time moviegoers were seeing the first installments of “Shrek” and “The Fast and the Furious.” Rolling down your windows that summer, you might have heard someone blasting Usher or the “Moulin Rouge” version of “Lady Marmalade.”
At the time, Kelty Greye was two years old. The musician behind the aforementioned cover, Greye has been playing violin since she was seven, and busking since her teens. Landing a song in a movie has been a longtime dream for her. She studied commercial songwriting in college, and was part of a team whose song for an MTSU commercial won a regional Emmy.
Greye even got signed by a sync-licensing agency to pitch her music for TV and film. They showed her a list of possible songs to cover, and she wound up adapting that one by Jimmy Eat World, which she’d heard as a kid. She ended up making it her own.
But since Greye graduated in 2024, she hadn’t found much traction in the sync biz:
“I actually had given up on music. I thought, ‘Well, it’s time to just get a real job and move on with life.’ Literally the day after I thought that, I woke up to an email.”
Someone wanted to put her cover of that Jimmy Eat World song in a movie. But they didn’t mention it was for DC’s “Supergirl.” Greye initially assumed it would be something small — an indie, maybe. Turns out…
“About an hour later I got an email with a draft of the deal, and it said ‘Warner Brothers,’ and I was like ‘What? You’re kidding!'”
So flash forward a few months. “Supergirl” has made its way to the theater, and so has Greye, along with some friends, for the kind of moment anyone who majors in commercial songwriting dreams of experiencing:
“It was really surreal. The first 30 seconds, I don’t think I could really sink in. My heart was pounding. All my friends next to me pulled their phones out. It was just really hard to be like, ‘that’s my voice in this film.’ But it’s a fairly long moment, and as it went on, I just sat there like, ‘I’m in a movie theater and my voice is coming out of the speakers.’ I wish I could go back and show my teenage self that, because I think she would flip out. I mean, I’m flipping out now.”
Greye’s not giving up her day job deploying her voice for a customer support hotline. But she’s hoping this win leads to others. She says maybe it’s like that line in “The Middle” — “It just takes some time.”
And meanwhile, she’s putting more music of her own out into the world:
Among Greye’s latest releases, “Haunt Me” has streamed well over 100 thousand times in its first month on Spotify. More of Greye’s music and backstory is on her website.
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