Niall Horan surprised Ella Bright with a duet of Baby Now That I Found You.
The former One Direction singer secretly recorded vocals to turn Off Campus star Ella’s cover of Foundations’ Baby Now That I Found You into a collaboration for the show’s newly released soundtrack, Off Campus: The Mixtape (Extra Credit).
Ella – who plays as music major Hannah Wells in the hockey romance TV series – shared her live reaction to the track and surprise message from Niall.
In the clip, he tells her: “You don’t know this yet, but you’re about to listen to our version of Baby Now That I Found You.”
Ella reacted by saying: “I’m obsessed. That’s so beautiful.”
Off Campus is based on author Elle Kennedy’s The Deal, which sees Hannah Wells make a deal with hockey bad boy Garrett Graham. In return for tutoring him, Graham pretends to date Hannah in order to make her crush jealous. However, sparks fly between the pair.
Speaking about Ella’s portrayal of Hannah, Kennedy previously told Rolling Stone: “When you see her, you feel this joy. She’s so talented and she brought Hannah’s dedication to music.”
Meanwhile, Niall released his fourth solo album Dinner Party earlier this year.
The record features the track End of an Era, which was partly inspired by the death of Niall’s One Direction bandmate Liam Payne.
Niall previously told Rolling Stone: “We wrote End of an Era about four times, because originally the song to me meant, ‘All right, we’re moving on’. Looking forward to the future, looking back on the past with nostalgia, being happy with what you had, excited for what’s going to happen. We’d written that song a long time ago. And then it was like, ‘No, we need to return to this,’ after Liam passed.
[Songwriters] John Ryan and Julian Bunetta lived next door to Liam for a long time, and we all grew up together. For the three of us, it was actually quite a crazy experience to have to write a song like that, because you don’t ever expect to. I remember myself and John stepping outside at the studio and writing these lyrics for 20 minutes. We started again and still had the chorus. Just a very weird experience for us all, but something that we all felt like we had to do for ourselves, for anyone who’s lost anyone, for the fans, for anyone that knew Liam. It felt like the right thing to do and something that we wanted to do just terrible that we had to.
“At the end of the day, all of my memories are happy. We were talking about it when we were writing it. All of our memories are traveling the world, messing around, having fun, and being teenagers. I don’t have negative memories. It felt liberating to write about. I think that comes across in the song. The first verse is quite sad, but then it’s like, ‘Remember all the good times we had.’ It’s got a bit of both in it. I love how it starts off as one type of song and then it turns into a different type of song. It also reminds me of some of the 1D stuff.”