“Watching You 2.0” will appear on Atkins’ forthcoming new album, True South, in addition to “Marry Me Again” and the project’s title track.

Rodney Atkins, Son Elijah Atkins; Photo by Andrew Wendowski

Rodney Atkins recently debuted “Watching You 2.0” — a nearly 20-year follow-up to his decade-long 2006 smash hit “Watching You,” which appears on his album, If You’re Going Through Hell.

The latest track, which dropped in May 2025, features guest vocals by Rodney Atkins’ eldest son, Elijah Atkins, who — as a child — not only inspired the original No. 1 but appeared in the official music video for that tune. At 22 years old, Elijah’s vocals bring a new sense of nostalgia to “Watching You 2.0” as he joins his dad in the light-hearted lyrics that highlight the special bond between a father and a son.

Atkins caught up with Music Mayhem to talk about his recently released “Watching You 2.0,” his relationship with Elijah (the son of Atkins’ ex-wife Tammy Jo), what led to the duet release, and what’s to come.

It turns out that it was a Father’s Day video that Atkins posted on TikTok in 2024, which led to the “Watching You 2.0” duet with Elijah.

“So last Father’s Day 2024, my wife (Rose Falcon) told me that I should do a duet TikTok, where I sing the verse and let people jump in and sing the chorus,” Atkins, who is also a father to sons Ryder and Scout, recalled the story behind how “Watching You 2.0” came about. “People started commenting [below the video], ‘You should sing it with your son, you should do it with your son.’ So the idea came from TikTok, everybody out there coming in and commenting on it.”

Although the idea of collaborating with his eldest child seemed simple, Atkins says he had to do a little coaxing to get Elijah to record a video of himself singing the song with his dad for social media.

“I’ve always wanted for him to come out and sing it with me as he was growing up, and he was always too shy,” Atkins said. “So my wife somehow — because Eli never wanted to do it — she bribed him with a bunch of chicken casseroles and a lot of sweet talk, telling him, ‘You can do it. You can do it. Just sing a chorus.’”

Rodney Atkins, Son Elijah Atkins; Photo by Andrew Wendowski

Luckily, the casseroles worked, and Elijah obliged; just a sampling of the pair duetting caught attention online.

“It was almost an instant, 12 million views,” Atkins recalled. “So Rose, my wife, she’s going, ‘You guys have got to do the whole version’… And man, the viralness of this has been crazy. It’s been so much fun. The response from people is amazing.”

In the studio, Atkins said Elijah was a natural. He didn’t need a whole lot of prep work and only had to cut a couple of vocal takes to have a finished product ready. However, singing the song with Atkins in a live setting took some practice, but soon enough, Elijah had it down. Atkins said the pair performed the “Watching You 2.0” together at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville and CMA Fest 2025 at Nissan Stadium.

At the Ryman Auditorium, which served as Elijah’s first-ever live debut, Atkins said, “I convinced him, it’ll be great … I told him, ‘Now, when you come out and start singing, you won’t hear a thing. Everything’s going to go away. You’re going to be in this tunnel. You’ll kind of lose where you are, but just keep singing.’ He came out, and he looked at me like a deer in the headlights. I started mouthing the words, and then he got it. He did great! And then the other performance, which is kind of even more surreal, he came out, we played the last night of the CMA Fest at Nissan Stadium, and he came out, sang the song, and he crushed it!”

Rodney Atkins; Photo by Andrew Wendowski

Atkins said Elijah received compliments from Zach Top after his performance, which is a good sign as the young talent is hoping to pursue a music career of his own. Already, he has dabbled in songwriting and recording, according to his father.

“I’m encouraging him, if he wants to pursue this, he can do it,” Atkins said of Elijah’s career aspirations. “He’s really smart. He’s finishing school in audio engineering now. I think he might try to put a little band together and play some places in Nashville, just to kind of dip his toes in the water and see how it feels. That’s kind of what it takes, is getting in and just doing it.”

And that seems to be the route Atkins has taken as someone who has jumped on the social media side of pushing out music. Since releasing “Watching You 2.0,” Atkins has seen firsthand just how much a nearly 20-year-old tune can still resonate with new audiences worldwide. The reimagined tune has earned such a positive response on social media that Atkins’ TikTok alone has grown over 400k followers since the beginning of the year. Just one month of generating over 30M views on TikTok has put Atkins in the company of artists like Post Malone, Jelly Roll, Megan Moroney, Shaboozey, and Luke Combs, bringing his career back into the forefront.

“A main goal of mine has always been to make music that remains relevant, that will be relevant 30 years ago, 30 years from now …,” Atkins said. “I mean, ‘Watching You’ speaks to that, that so many new people are relating to that song. It is the coolest thing ever when all these young folks are knowing the words. It’s really cool.”

Surprisingly, “Watching You” didn’t always receive the positive feedback that it has over time. Reflecting on the original song and his decision to release it back in 2006, Atkins says, the tune drew a lot of criticism from folks early on.

“A lot of the reviews for the first ‘Watching You’ were brutal. I mean, there would be reviews saying, ‘F you,’” Atkins recalled. ‘This is horrible. This is terrible.’ That’s mostly what I saw. And obviously I’m like, ‘Well. This is over before it starts.’ But, I learned…. Just don’t pay attention [because] you don’t want people saying, ‘That’s pretty good.’ You want people loving it and hating it. You want a passion scale. I learned a lot over the years. I always got bad reviews. The critics always hated me, but the people listened to the songs, and then they became anthems. That’s the big thing I learned: don’t worry about the critics, it’s the people that you’re singing to.”

Before releasing the 2006 smash, Atkins said he even received pushback from his label.

“The head of A & R said, ‘Look. Watching You is a cute song. I just don’t know if that many people are going to relate to you singing about your 4-year-old saying a four-letter word and the way you wrote the song. It’s very personal, so I don’t know if it’ll reach a lot of people,” Atkins said. “He said, ‘But we’re going to release it because you never know, and we’re afraid somebody else will hear ‘Watching You’ and steal the idea, and then they’ll write it.’ So that’s how it became a single. And I learned from that. It is so personal that that’s what makes songs seem personal for other folks.”

“So that’s definitely what’s on my mind when I’m trying to write these songs,” Atkins adds of the new, highly anticipated collection of music that he’s planning to share with the fans.

Rodney Atkins, Son Elijah Atkins and his son Elijah Atkins; Photo by Andrew Wendowski

That album is called True South, and already, folks have gotten early previews with “Watching You 2.0,” and previously released tracks, “Marry Me Again” and the project’s title track, “True South.”

“This is kind of the last song in the way that this came together for a brand-new album. We’ve got a whole new album coming called True South,” Atkins confirmed. “It’s just an album full of — there’s a couple of ballads on there, but it’s mostly just fun uptempo songs. I love ‘We’ songs like ‘These Are My People,’ you know, we’re in this together kind of songs. It’s an album full of just fun country songs. It’s the most fun album I’ve ever made, and we’ll be coming out with that soon.”