Unstoppable: A whirlwind few months helped make Tate McRae one ...

A whirlwind few months have helped make this Calgarian one of the world's biggest pop stars

Published Dec 08, 2023  •  Last updated 21 minutes ago  •  6 minute read

Tate McRae. Photo by @baeth Photo by @baeth /cal

In July, Tate McRae made a trip home to Calgary. While the pop singer has been living in Los Angeles for the past few years, she generally returns for her July 1 birthday and sticks around for the Calgary Stampede.

It was during this period when McRae wrote a contemplative poem that she would eventually turn into the ballad Calgary, not so much as an homage to her hometown but an “introspective, personal analysis” about how she feels whenever she returns from the surreal world she has been a part of for the past four years.

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“Same bar, same street. I’m 20 but I feel like I’m 15,” she sings in the opening line of the ballad, reflecting on how the line between Tate McRae: International pop star and Tate McRae: Teenager from Calgary tends to fade when she is in town.

“I feel really independent and I have a career and my own apartment and I feel so grown up and then I go home and I’m literally 15 again and I’m literally the most annoying little sister ever and I’m a pain in the ass to my parents,” says McRae, in a Zoom interview with Postmedia. “It’s like ‘How did this happen? Why is it whenever I come home, I’m automatically the same girl I was in high school?’ So it’s interesting. Every time I come home, I really look forward to it. Coming back to a place that’s so normal and so what I’m used to. It feels really homey. It’s just so refreshing from L.A.”

This period of down-to-earth reflection is perhaps not altogether novel for a 20-year-old returning home. But most 20-year-olds have not scaled the heights McRae has since leaving Calgary. She has not been an overnight success, of course. The upward trajectory has been full throttle for years, turning her from an online success with millions of subscribers on a YouTube channel of her performing songs recorded in her Calgary bedroom to an international superstar who travels the world and records with some of the industry’s top producers.

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But even by the heady standards of her recent past, the last few months have eclipsed any other period in her life in terms of success. In November, she made a highly publicized appearance on Saturday Night Live where she was the musical guest alongside host Jason Momoa. She performed the ballad Grave and the dance hit Greedy, one of the new songs that has helped her career jump to new heights. In mid-November, Spotify named her Canada’s EQUAL Ambassador, a program designed to amplify “women creators around the world” and “combat gender disparity.” Meanwhile, the song has garnered more than 426 million streams on that platform, making it McRae’s biggest hit. It’s been largely reported that her numbers were higher than Beyonce’s that month. She was the focus of a lengthy cover story in Billboard Magazine and the CBC even did a trend piece that month on something called “cursive singing,” which is apparently exemplified by McRae’s enunciation when performing Greedy. It featured a linguist, opera singer and a historian pontificating about the style, which is described in the article as “elongated vowels, clipped consonants and run-on phrasing.” Greedy reached No. 1 on the Billboard Charts and has earned her new fans globally, including in the U.K., Australia, Germany, France, the Netherlands, the Nordics, Brazil, India, Asia and Latin America. Her face appeared on a massive Billboard in Dundas Square in downtown Toronto.

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Her assured performance of the song on SNL, meanwhile, showcased a confident performer who seemed very comfortable in a sexy pop-star mould alongside some backup dancers. She certainly didn’t seem nervous but admits she was.

McRae arrived at 30 Rockefeller Place with her parents on Nov. 18. She says all three were “fan-girling.”

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“SNL was the biggest dream come true,” she says. “I did not expect to even get that call at all any time soon. So it was like a big shock for me, I was sobbing. Even just being in that building that has so much history of the greatest artists of all time. I was like ‘This is such an honour to even be here and have my name up on the wall right beside Jason Momoa. It was just like a big whirlwind. Mom and Dad were fangirling so hard on so many of the actors. It was a really surreal process. I haven’t been so nervous for something in a very long time. It’s so live: you get one shot and the show is over.”

The show is far from over for McRae and 2024 promises to be another big year, with a 53-date global tour to start in April that will take her into London, Amsterdam, Prague, Paris, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Nashville, New York, Sydney and Melbourne. She also has a local show scheduled for July 5, although a venue hasn’t been named as of yet.  

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Dec. 7 marked the release of Think Later, a 14-track album that veers from the moody pop-smarts of Cut My Hair to the impossibly catchy Greedy, playful Exes and the beautiful acoustic ballad Plastic Palm Trees.

The Billboard cover story treats McRae as a major, up-and-coming artist that traces her evolution and how she continues to flex her independence and insist on calling the shots when it comes to her career. Her first full-length album, the impressive but undeniably angsty I Used to Think I Could Fly, came out in May of 2022 following a largely sold-out tour of Europe. She launched the album by performing acoustically while flying around New York City in a private jet.

But she wanted the writing and production process of Think Later to be different. On her previous album, she worked with a who’s-who of collaborators and A-list producers in big L.A. studios. For Think Later, she whittled down her core team to Ryan Tedder, Amy Allen and Jasper Harris who helped her “write some pop songs I’ve been dying to write for a very long time.”

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“I had a completely different approach,” she says. “Obviously, I think your perspective changes a lot from the age of 16 to 20 and I had gone through a lot of different experiences and wanted to write a record that kind of tapped into my playful side of writing. I feel like I had pigeon-holed myself into this part of music that was only sad, depressing songs. I was like ‘I need to escape and be able to write stuff I can dance to and move to and create visuals to.”

As for maintaining control of her career in an industry that likes to control female artists, McRae admits “it’s a lot more difficult than it seems.”

“You don’t get an instruction manual on how to do this,” she says. “You have a million options in front of you and you have to make the choice, to make the right one. I’ve been presented with so many different opinions and sometimes the louder it gets, the more confusing it gets. I think what has been the most grounding for me is taking the silence in between all the craziness and trusting my gut and going back to what I really want. I think also, as a young woman in the industry, it’s hard to speak up sometimes because it’s so intimidating and people don’t always fully believe in you at the beginning. It’s getting the courage to speak up and say what you want and be pretty stubborn on that to make sure you are making the choices in your career you want and that you believe in.”

Tate McRae’s album Think Later is now available.

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