Tate McRae on Entering Her Main Pop Girl Era With ‘Think Later’ and Accusations of Being an Industry Plant: ‘I’ve Been Grinding Since 13’

Steven J. Horowitz
·9 min read
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There was a moment in the run-up to the weekend before Thanksgiving when something suddenly shifted for Tate McRae. She released the video for “Exes” on November 16 to a jolting reaction: Who is that girl whipping her hair and hitting that choreography in a bathroom straight out of a “Saw” movie? At that point, “Greedy,” a twinkling blend of lite-vanity and full-blooded confidence, had already begun to pollinate the charts after osmosing the great divide between TikTok and mainstream.

Which is why two days later, her performance of “Greedy” on “Saturday Night Live” showed that she could do it all in real-time. She only added to the cause the next night, where she did it again at the Billboard Music Awards. The discourse was hitting its peak: Is she the new mother? Must we Stan? Could she be the next main pop girlie?

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“My true fans knew I danced, but it was finally for the first time like, is she an industry plant?” says the 20-year-old. She’s seated at a broken conference table in a corner office at her Los Angeles management company, wearing an oversized red jacket with black fringe down the sleeves. “I’m like, I’ve been grinding since 13 years old! I’m probably the furthest thing from an industry plant for how long I’ve been doing this.”

Recently anointed Tater-Tots (her fandom name) met her explosive arrival with equal parts intrigue and skepticism. But anyone with a YouTube or TikTok account—and just the right algorithm—would know that McRae has been a songwriter, dancer and singer since making waves with 2020’s “You Broke Me First,” which now tallies 1.2 billion streams on Spotify. In the years that followed, she planted her flag as a moody, introspective analog to Billie Eilish, a diary-scribbler who wore it proudly with song titles like “Feel Like Shit” and “Don’t Be Sad.” But her recent reinvention secured her first bona fide smash with “Greedy,” which has been used in more than two million TikTok posts and topped the Billboard Global 200 and Spotify’s Global charts.

Much of it is because “Think Later,” McRae’s sophomore album that was released on Friday, is a rebirth. She wipes the slate of the more somber bedroom fare that largely drove her debut full-length, last year’s “I Used to Think I Could Fly,” and assumes a new form as a pop savant, one who bastes cutting pop production with raspy meditations on love and heartache. On opener “Cut My Hair,” she makes her mission statement known: “Couple years back, so sensitive yeah / Moving like that gets repetitive, yeah / Singing ’bout the same old stupid ass things / Sad girl bit got a little boring.”

“I was like, god, writing sad songs and being depressing, no one has ever seen a different side of me,” she says. “All they’ve seen is victim, depressed Tate. Sometimes you grow up and things change and I got bored of it. So I’m like, I want to switch this up, but it feels perfect because I think it’s fun to take a jab at yourself sometimes and your older self.”

When McRae began recording “Think Later” at the top of the year, she felt lost. She was coming off of an 11-month break—the longest breath she’s taken since she started pursuing dancing seriously as a teen—and was unmoored, unsure of who she was and what she wanted to say as an artist. Add to the fact that here she was, alone in Los Angeles after moving from her native Calgary, Canada at 17, navigating the music industry on her own.

“I’ve been a very intuitive person my whole life, and I totally lost that the past five years,” she says. “My intuition was so buried among so many voices. And I did a lot of self-work and meditating and was like, what the fuck do I want and who am I? I had no idea.” She looks back at “I Used to Think I Could Fly” and how she simply acquiesced to suggestions from songwriters to try on as many sounds and identities as possible. “It’s so drastic from this record that I made right now. I think the biggest thing was the look of it, my album cover art, I was put in a hot pink dress, and I was like, I don’t even like pink!”

Which isn’t to say she doesn’t respect the album and its statement. It’s just that “Think Later” was an opportunity for her to lasso creative control and chisel a spot for herself in the pop firmament. It began with mood boards and playlists (one “sonic,” another “inspiration”) that drew from early 2000s culture. She agrees that “Greedy,” for example, has shades of Nelly Furtado’s “Promiscuous,” and referenced the song’s producer Timbaland during the writing process.

What helped McRae narrow her vision was assembling a core team of writers who could crystallize it. OneRepublic’s Ryan Tedder, who serves as executive producer on “Think Later,” played a key role alongside Amy Allen and Jasper Harris. She and Tedder bumped heads in their first Zoom session—”I was like I have my writing ways, and he was like, ‘I have my writing ways'”—but they settled into a groove that yielded consistent returns. Throughout the year, she recalls, there were roughly 80 to 90 sessions to yield the 14 tracks that made the album.

“Think Later” is as much radio fish food as it is a personal manifesto. There are the sassy bops, like the swishy “Guilty Conscience” and boyfriend-stealing “Hurt My Feelings,” and then the more downbeat reflections like “Plastic Palm Trees” and “Calgary,” where she sheds her skin of a bad breakup and the insecurities that linger from her teenage years. That duality was front and center during her “SNL” performances: one of “Greedy,” full choreo on display, another of “Grave,” poised at the mic singing of loosening the shackles of a forlorn relationship. (Her appearance on the show resonated far: Eilish texted her after, Harry Styles sent her flowers.)

Listeners have taken notice, and she’s aware she’s under a microscope. Women in pop have historically been held to a higher standard, one that doesn’t actually exist, and McRae is no exception. But she doesn’t internalize it. Instead of doomscrolling through comments on social media, she instead chooses to focus on the things that matter, like perfecting her artistry and delivering her best.

“I cannot do Twitter. Twitter is the scariest place on earth. My biggest advice is, never search your name on Twitter,” she says, laughing. “And it’s so funny because people just love to go in on young women. Whenever they do something in the industry, it’s them who are the first to get picked apart. Their songwriting is not good enough, they’re not smart enough, they’re not pretty enough, they’re not dressed well enough, their creative direction is the wrong way. Everything is getting picked apart, always. And I see this with my friends, I see it with people I admire. I’m like, what are we doing? We’re writing music and doing what we love and I know we’re putting ourselves out there to get judged, but sometimes, it’s a little excessive.”

McRae is no stranger to being the Internet’s main character. She created her YouTube account in 2011—yes, when she was 11—and it was predominately dance videos. Being a dancer seemed like the path McRae would take growing up in Calgary, where she started training at six and studied ballet in the years that followed. But music always intrigued her, ever since her grandfather got her a piano when she was six.

By 2017, she started posting original songs on YouTube as part of her “Create With Tate” series, which set her singing career into motion. Labels came calling after her video for her first song “One Day” went viral to the tune of 40 million views to date, and by 2019, she had signed with RCA. Thus began her journey to discover what kind of artist she wanted to be. And after a few years of loose singles, she released her debut EP “All the Things I Never Said” in Jan. 2020, just before the start of the pandemic. She wasn’t sure of its impact and soldiered on like many musicians did, turning to social media to share song ideas with fans and get real-time feedback.

“You Broke Me First” took hold, with more than 800,000 TikTok creates, and guest appearances on more upbeat singles like Regard’s “You” (also featuring Troye Sivan) and Tiesto’s “10:35” now play as precursors to the vibrant pop of “Think Later.” While the sad girl image of prior music lingers, McRae had become intent on finding a way to marry the strength of her pop prowess with her dancing abilities. It’s here where her creative director, Bradley J. Caldwell, came into the fold to translate the thumping heartbeat of her new songs into eye-catching performances and visuals.

“I want something fresh in the industry,” she says. “We’re getting shoved in the face with so much music right now, and I’m like, I miss music videos. Why are music videos becoming not a big deal anymore? That’s what life is about, watching music videos and listening to music. I was like, this is getting so lost.”

What she found was an audience that resonated with her style on a level higher than ever before. The video for “Greedy” has almost 50 million views in two months, and she’s become a regular talking point online. Now that her TikTok and YouTube acclaim has crossed over, she’s about to see it all transpire tangentially, with a tour planned for 2024 including a headlining stint at New York City’s Madison Square Garden.

Still, for McRae, she just wants fans to understand where she’s coming from, and most importantly, that she’s in full control of the narrative. “If you’re not hands-on, someone else is going to have to be hands-on,” she says. “I don’t want to not have a say in any part of this. I want to be on every phone call, I want to be on every creative meeting, I want to be the one giving all the ideas for these music videos. And also because,” she adds, “I have fun doing it. I just genuinely love it.”

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