Ayra Starr's 'Heaven Baby' Meaning and NFL Halftime: Her Name Rose, Views Fell

On Sunday 11 October, Ayra Starr opened the halftime show of the second of the NFL's three London games this season, Philadelphia Eagles against Jacksonville Jaguars at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, with 'Heaven Baby', her duet with ZAYN about a love she would die for. Did the show lift the song? Not on YouTube. Google searches for her name jumped tenfold for one hour, but daily views of the 'Heaven Baby' video fell that day, worldwide and in Britain, where the NFL said the show would go out live.

Most of what has been written since Sunday is about the stage itself, reported as the first time an African artist headlined one of the halftime shows at the NFL's games abroad. We looked at something narrower: what a six-minute set in front of a football crowd did to the song she chose to open it. The numbers come from YouTube's daily charts, Spotify's daily charts, the Shazam charts of 70 countries, Google Trends and Wikipedia's reader counts, most of which our topic radar reads every morning.

The 'Heaven Baby' video peaked three days before London

The song is not new. It came out on 14 August as a track on Starrgirl, her third album, released by Mavin under licence to Republic Records. On Spotify it did its biggest business in Nigeria in its first week, No. 2 on the weekly chart with 2,282,904 streams, and by the week to 8 October it had slid to No. 70 there, with 428,008.

The video gave it a second wind. 'Ayra Starr - Heaven Baby ft. ZAYN' went up on her VEVO channel on 5 October. YouTube's daily music video chart counts views country by country, and it shows the video's best day worldwide was 8 October, with 1,657,560 views and a place at No. 16. From there it eased every day: 1,493,719 on the 9th, 1,360,216 on the 10th, 1,291,681 on the day of the show and 1,200,367 on the 12th.

Britain followed the same line, show or no show. The NFL had announced the set would go out live there on Channel 5 and Sky Sports, yet the video's British views went from 42,131 on 8 October to 37,814 the day before the game, 34,285 on the day and 29,442 the day after. In the United States it drew 110,089 views on 8 October, dropped out of the American top 100 on the 10th and did not come back after the show.

Nigeria tells the same story with a twist. The video went to No. 1 there on 12 October on 44,626 views, a shade up from 44,154 on the day of the show but fewer than the 55,006 it had at No. 2 on 7 October: it climbed because the videos above it lost more. Spotify in Nigeria and South Africa did tick up on the Monday after the game, to 73,005 and 33,107 daily streams from 68,944 and 29,407 on the Saturday. In South Africa that was the song's best day yet, at No. 21, though it had been climbing there since the video came out (No. 111 on 5 October); Nigeria had already done 80,228 on Friday 9 October.

What the halftime show did move: searches for Ayra Starr

The show's effect is easy to see once you stop counting plays and count searches. Google Trends scores worldwide interest by the hour, with the busiest hour set at 100. For 'Ayra Starr' the daily high from 7 to 9 October was 8 or 9. The busiest hour of the week was 15:00 to 16:00 UTC on 11 October, 90 minutes after kick-off at 14:30 London time (13:30 UTC). The hour before it scored 10 and the hour after it 14.

Wikipedia saw the same rush. Her English article had 551 readers on 1 October and 1,727 on the eve of the game. On 11 October it had 11,274, about 20 times its level at the start of the month, and 3,202 the next day. The article on 'Heaven Baby' itself had 243 readers on the day of the show. People wanted to know who she was more than what she had just sung.

The hour also changed who was searching. Google ranks countries by the share of their searches that went to a name. From 7 to 9 October, 14 of the top 15 places for 'Ayra Starr' were African countries, led by Zambia. In the hours around the show (14:00 to 17:00 UTC) Britain (19, on a scale where Zambia was 100), the United States (15), Germany (13), Switzerland (10), Hungary (8), Austria (7) and Canada (4) entered that list.

Shazam found 'Heaven Baby' in the US and Canada; Britain lagged

People reach for Shazam when a song catches them and they cannot put a name to it, so a new country on its chart is a fair sign that new listeners met the song. Once a day since 2 October our radar has logged the first 100 places of the national Shazam charts of 70 countries; each chart covers the past seven days. In every reading from 2 October to the day of the show, 'Heaven Baby' sat in the top 100 of 10 or 11 of them, all African, from Cameroon (as high as No. 3) and Kenya to South Africa.

On the US chart Shazam dated 12 October it entered that top 100 for the first time, at No. 58, with Portugal at 96 and Canada at 97. On the charts dated 13 October the US was at 51 and Canada at 74. Britain, where she played, was much lower: No. 145 on Shazam's full UK top 200 dated 13 October, below France at 137. Shazam does not say where a listener heard a song, and we could not confirm that American television showed the set; the NFL posted the full show on its YouTube channel at 17:26 UTC that day. That upload runs 6 minutes 9 seconds and had 605,005 views some 52 hours later, about half of what the 'Heaven Baby' video drew worldwide on its weakest day that week.

'Heaven Baby' meaning: her doubt, then ZAYN's answer

'Heaven Baby' is a love song in two voices: Ayra Starr confesses how far she would go for someone and wonders whether he could even take it in, and ZAYN answers that he would go past the sky for her. She starts alone. In the first verse she says she knows the lengths she would go to for him and wishes he knew it too, then asks whether he would follow if she said it out loud. She is all in, and on her own.

The pre-chorus is her answer to her own doubt. It leans on the old saying that real love is simply recognised, then borrows one of the best-known lines of the 1996 film Jerry Maguire, with three hellos in front of it: “Hello, hello, hello, you had me at hello”. It was settled at the first word. Life is short, she grants, but looking at him she senses there is more to it than that.

That 'more' is where the title comes in. In the hook, “You could be my heaven, baby”, the word that matters is 'could': heaven is something she is offering, not something she claims to have. The rest of the chorus keeps two kinds of heaven in play, the person and the place you go after death. She would die for him if he allowed it, she calls him an angel who has no need of wings, and if he ever left the planet, which can mean walking out on her or dying, she could not cope. Life without him, she sings, would be insanity. Then she asks him outright whether he is heaven.

Then ZAYN turns her opening line around. She wished he knew the lengths she would go to; he asks whether she knows the lengths he would go to, and says beyond the sky, which is to say as far as heaven. He takes the old order in which a boss says jump and the other asks how high, and turns it into a lover's promise: tell him to jump and he will, he only needs the height.

He then sings her pre-chorus back to her, the same lines in a second voice, and the last chorus is sung by both of them. The doubt she started with is gone by the end. What began as one person's confession finishes as an agreement, and the last chorus ends with both voices on the words 'couldn't manage'. The love is overwhelming and fated, the devotion goes as far as life itself, and the fear underneath it all is the empty life on the other side of losing someone.

Ayra Starr's NFL halftime setlist, and why 'Heaven Baby' opened it

On paper it was the right opener for an American sport in a British stadium. YouTube's chart credits list the American pop production team The Monsters & Strangerz among its producers, alongside Isaiah Tejada and Aldae, and the second verse belongs to the British singer ZAYN, formerly of One Direction. It runs two minutes 39 seconds, and 20 of its 35 lyric lines are the chorus, sung twice.

Played on its own, 'Heaven Baby' is a gentle song. Our listening software, run on the video, lists an electric piano among the sounds of its opening seconds, hears her voice at 6.7 seconds and the first chorus at 0:39; the music falls away after that chorus, around 1:10, before ZAYN comes in, and it saves its peak in volume for the closing chorus, from 1:48, where both voices sing together.

At Tottenham it was the one tender stretch of the set. Run on the NFL's upload, the same software hears 'heaven' at 0:40, then 'rush' from 1:51, the hook of 'Rush', and 'body' from 4:19, from 'Hot Body'. It tags the first 82 seconds as tender, R&B-like singing and almost everything after them as Afrobeat or music of Africa, so she gave 'Heaven Baby' about 70 seconds, under half its length, before turning to dance songs. Reports list more songs in the set; those three are the ones we could pick out ourselves.

A song made for a sports event can live off it for months. Two months after the World Cup final, Shakira and Burna Boy's World Cup song, 'Dai Dai', still topped YouTube's weekly song list in 19 countries. 'Heaven Baby' was not written for football; it was dropped into a halftime slot, and the numbers above suggest a halftime slot buys a burst of attention for the name, not the song.

What London bought Ayra Starr: a name, for now

In the days we can measure, the London show sent people in Britain, the US, Germany, Austria and Switzerland to search for her name, and her English Wikipedia page drew 20 times its early-October readers that day; by 13 October the song had also entered the Shazam top 100 in the US and Canada. It did not send them to the video, or to the song's Spotify streams in Britain and the US, in numbers any chart can see. The 'Heaven Baby' video had already had its best days, in its first week online, before she reached the stadium.

We expect that to hold. By 31 October 'Heaven Baby' will still be missing from the Spotify daily top 200 of both Britain and the United States, and its video's best day worldwide will still be 8 October. If either turns out wrong, the halftime show did more than these numbers show, and we will say so.