Touchdown!
With his latest song “Let ‘Em Know,” covered by Shaboozey for the opening theme of Amazon Prime broadcasts of the NFL’s Thursday Night Football, Halifax’s Jenson Vaughan has quarterbacked his way to a pinnacle of persistence.
Co-written by his Stockholm-based pals Zack Hall and John Emilio, Vaughan’s latest success debuted Sept. 11, 2025, during the broadcast of the game between the Green Bay Packers and the Washington Commanders, and averaged 17.76 million viewers (as reported by Sports Media Watch).
The song will be performed to introduce each Amazon-aired game of the 17-week NFL season and the wild card match, with Forbes magazine reporting that each Prime Video game is averaging 14.78 million viewers on average, up 12% compared with the 2024 season average.
“It’s a truly incredible, once-in-a-lifetime thing,” Vaughan says of his Super Bowl-of-song-placement victory – and it almost didn’t happen.
Vaughan – a prolific tunesmith, whose previous triumphs include the trance-driven, Grammy-nominated, and JUNO Award-winning “This is What It Feels Like,” by Armin van Buuren and ex-soulDecision singer Trevor Guthrie; Madonna’s dance-chart-topping EDM banger “Girl Gone Wild”; and Britney Spears’s electronically-charged “Til It’s Gone” – reveals that the National Football League had been pushing for another song before “Let ‘Em Know” entered the picture, just before the deadline to cut the tune.
“It’s a truly incredible, once-in-a-lifetime thing”
It was only through a full year of Vaughan’s hustling tenacity that the song even hit the radar of Shaboozey, whose debut hit “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” tied a Billboard U.S. record of 19 weeks at No. 1 (matching the run of Little Nas X’s “Old Town Road”), and set a Billboard Canada record of 25 weeks at the peak.
Let’s start at the beginning: After returning home from a 2024 Swedish writing trip, Vaughan continued to collaborate with Hall and Emilio over Zoom. “This one was actually written with Shaboozey in mind,” says Vaughan. “We Zoomed, and it’s the first song we ever worked on, which is crazy odds. We gave it a couple of days to digest it after we finished it, but we felt like we hit a home run.”
Simultaneously, another of Vaughan’s friends had started an A&R (artists and repertoire) position at EMPIRE, Shaboozey’s label. Says Vaughan: “I send it to my friend and he comes back strong on it, and says, ‘It’s in the mix, I’ll add it to the pile.’ It was a good starting point.”
Between September of 2024 and March of 2025, the songwriter estimates that he e-mailed his EMPIRE pal 10 times, but because Shaboozey had scored his smash hit “A Bar Song (Tipsy),” Vaughan imagined that the artist’s A&R team was being swamped with pitches. “The last few e-mails, there was no response, and I thought, ‘Okay, I can’t let it die there,’” says Vaughan. “Everyone I’ve played it to says, ‘Dude, get it to Shaboozey.’”
Select the image to access the video of the NFL Thursday Night Football opening theme song “Let ‘Em Know”
So, he tracked down Jared Cotter, Shaboozey’s manager, and sent two more e-mails. No reply. “Now we’re in early July. I’m walking down the street, and the song randomly comes into my mind again, and my instinct tells me to send another e-mail. So the third one, I decide to go for it. I write, ‘Hey Jared, you have to hear this song. It’s a no-brainer.’”
When Vaughan awoke the next morning, an e-mail from Cotter was waiting in his in-box. “His response was, ‘Hey, thanks for your persistence on this, I’d love to talk to you about the song, let’s set up a call for next week,” says Vaughan.
“Fast forward a week, and here’s the situation from Cotter: Shaboozey’s got this big collab with the NFL coming up, and they had this other song that they were really pushing, but it didn’t really fit Shaboozey. At this point, we’re only a month-and-a-half out from the season opener.
“[Cotter says,]‘Then, we hear your song, and it’s absolutely perfect for what we want. I’ve already sent it to the NFL, and they’ve greenlit it, Shaboozey loves it, he wants to cut it, he wants it for the NFL theme.’
“I told him that in the first e-mail I sent him, which he didn’t see,” says Vaughan. “I said, specifically, ‘This feels like a really big sports anthem to me.’ “It also feels to me like if I didn’t send that last e-mail, this opportunity wouldn’t have happened.”
Vaughan is hoping “Let “Em Know” becomes an evergreen for Amazon Prime over the years, as they’ve licensed the NFL rights to air Thursday night games for a decade, and the song for a year, with subsequent option years as well.
The association is already paying dividends, by helping him break into Nashville. “I found my calling card,” says Vaughan. “It’s opened a few doors, and given me the confidence to knock on more doors, quite frankly. I recently developed an incredible new relationship in Nashville with Carrie Underwood’s management – they’ve just put a hold on a song of mine – and Bailey Zimmerman’s manager, who’s also put a song of mine on hold.
“I was always very confident in terms of reaching out to people, but this has made me so confident, that anything is possible. I’m self-managed, and I believe that if people are receptive and listening, I can make it happen.”
“I found my calling card; it’s opened a few doors”
Currently splitting his time between Halifax and Toronto, Vaughan says he hasn’t slowed down on the international travel front, spending a good portion of 2025 pursuing writing relationships in Paris, Berlin, London, Stockholm. and songwriting camps in Ibiza, the South of France, and Cornwall, U.K.
“Nashville is a new target,” he says. “Especially if I get this Carrie Underwood placement locked up. It’s one of my best. So, if I get that one across the finish line, I’ll have to be there more. It showcases my writing; I’m super-proud of it, and I really think it could go far, that one.”
Vaughan, who conservatively estimates writing about 200 songs annually, says he’s enjoyed a banner year, and attributes his success to streamlining his creative process. “The way I like to do it now is to pick up a guitar and hit when inspiration strikes,” he says. “It’s pretty shocking to see how quickly I can get these songs out: the best ones come in 20 or 30 minutes. I’ve just figured out my process, and it’s way more efficient.
“When I realized that all my best songs came from that place of already knowing everything that I was writing down, it was uncovering something that already exists, rather than forcing it. I just stopped forcing it completely, and then all of my songs started to get better.”