In the weeks leading up to dropping her sophomore album “Think Later,” it’s been somewhat impossible to miss Tate McRae. The 13-year-old “So You Think You Can Dance” contestant turned twentysomething major label pop star made her “Saturday Night Live” debut in late November, performed at the Billboard Awards and released two hit songs, “Greedy” and “Exes.”
Now, “Think Later” is finally out via RCA Records, written and produced with Ryan Tedder and Tyler Spry and marking McRae’s new era of fame.
“‘Greedy,’ I think it was the start of an era, so it was kind of just shooting shots in the dark,” McRae says over the phone the week of her “SNL” performance. “I feel like I didn’t know how people were going to process it at all. And then [‘Exes’], I was working with this exact same crew again on the music video and in the writing process, and it just felt a little bit more like I had my people around me, so it was really exciting for us to all drop it. We were all very proud of the art we made.”
McRae’s combination of dance skills and pop bangers has earned her comparisons to the pop giants of yesteryear, like Britney and Christina.
McRae is a wholehearted fan of the genre, and is proud to be carrying the torch.
“I think for a while there, pop got kind of buried by a lot of different other genres, and I think the world just really missed it. I think pop is one of those genres that you can make crazy dance videos to, and I feel like females really thrive [in it],” McRae says. “I think the world literally just missed it and missed the pop girls coming out, and that’s why I feel like a lot of us young girls are coming back with pop songs right now. It feels like a bit of a refresher in the industry.”
“Think Later,” which she will tour next year, marks a new chapter in the career of the 20-year-old Calgary native, who has been in the spotlight already for nearly a decade.
“Obviously when you’re growing up on the internet, you’re documenting your teenage years into your early 20s. That’s what I’ve been documenting in my songwriting for the past couple years. And so my perspective from age 16 to now age 20 has changed so vastly.…I’m a completely different person now,” she says. “It felt like this album was a little more what I envisioned creating the album would be like. I came in with a whiteboard and got to check off the track list, and it felt a little more like what I saw in all the documentaries growing up.”
She was inspired to name it “Think Later” while reflecting on her past year and how she found herself making decisions by gut instinct first.
“I felt like I had gotten myself into a lot of situations because I was leading with my intuition and heart first and kind of just diving into situations and wasn’t necessarily thinking as much as I usually do, which is in some sense a very beautiful thing because it gave me this very careless attitude and I was able to fully immerse myself in every situation,” she says. “But then also I got hit with the repercussions and the consequences of falling in love and being so deeply into something and then if it ever gets taken away from you, I mean, the heartbreak and the feeling of loss is just so much worse. It’s really crazy because I feel like my writing very much felt like a roller coaster because it was very much capturing every moment of my life this year, and the very intense relationships I went through. And so it was very satisfying when I got to listen to the album and hear those stories again.”
For the cover art she opted to be photographed wearing hockey knee pads, an ode to her Calgary roots.
“I’ve just been around hockey my whole life. My brother plays hockey, he goes to Dartmouth, and my dad played hockey and obviously where I’m from, Calgary, it’s a very big thing,” she says. “I feel like I’ve spent my whole life trying to get out of Calgary, trying to be like, ‘I want to move to L.A. and I want to get into music.’ And for the first time I’ve really started to embrace where I came from and started to fall in love with my roots a little more. And you can tell throughout the whole album, there’s a through line of Calgary and my hometown.”
