Interview with rising star Tate McRae: "I may seem young but I know what I want and what I want to write about.”
Canada’s Tate McRae is one of the pop world’s hottest stars-on-the-rise. With a collection of edgy yet emotive tracks spanning indie pop and electronica, she has impressively accumulated billions of streams in the past three years and is currently the 120th most streamed artist in the world on Spotify. And all this at just seventeen years of age. “Sometimes it’s hard when people think age equals a better song,” she says. “I may seem young but I really know what I want and what I want to write about.” And with her single ‘You Broke Me First’ riding high in the charts around the world, thanks in part to a standout appearance at this year’s MTV Music Video Awards, McRae is proving she is an artist with nous and talent well beyond her years, and someone we will be hearing a lot more from in the future.
McRae’s mother was a dance teacher and it is perhaps no surprise that dancing was the first creative outlet McRae turned to, at age six. She started dancing professionally as a teenager and it wasn’t long before she was winning major accolades. She won a two-week scholarship to the Berlin State Ballet company, performed on Justin Bieber’s 2016 world tour as a backup dancer and in the same year, aged just thirteen, came third on the US version of TV show So You Think You Can Dance. “My whole life I’ve just always wanted to train, always wanted to be focused,” she says. “My way of happiness was working, and training and writing and being creative. That’s how I kind of escaped from things.”
She started her own YouTube channel at just ten, and a few years later began uploading video performances of her own songs. “I didn’t know anything about the music industry, anything about music,” she says. “And I was like, ‘Yeah, I’m gonna post an original song every Friday.’ I just posted them for fun because I liked writing.” In 2017, she decided to make the move from YouTube, and uploaded one of her songs, ‘One Day’, to the music-streaming platforms. A beautiful, stripped-back piano ballad, it tells a story of all-consuming but unrequited love: “I understand that you will never be mine / And that’s fine, I’m just breaking inside.” The track went viral, and McRae soon found herself creating a buzz – ‘One Day’ has over 107 million streams to date on Spotify. But while this was all going on, McRae was completely oblivious to her newfound global popularity. “We released it just randomly one day,” she says. “It was such a not-strategic thing at all. We were like, ‘Alright, we’re gonna post this on Spotify and Apple and see how it does.’ I didn’t check back into views or streams or anything for months. When I finally looked it [had] literally just hit gold record [status].” The success of the song saw her sign a record deal with RCA and several singles followed, along with the debut EP all the things i never said, released in January this year.
As a songwriter and performer, there is a remarkable maturity about McRae that belies her age. Her lyrics are intelligent, meaningful and astute, and the music is compelling and sophisticated. While many of her songs tap into teen angst – broken hearts, schoolyard drama – she delivers them with such authenticity that they make sense to anyone of any age. She says that her age means she is often underestimated by those in the industry. “When I first got into [songwriting] sessions at fourteen, it was like, ‘You’re fourteen, you know nothing, let us write the song’,” she says. “And that for me was like ‘Whoa, I have my own opinions too!’ It’s kind of frustrating. I usually don’t like to tell my age until the end of a session so that people can trust my voice and trust what I want to say.”
In April this year McRae released the moody electro single ‘You Broke Me First’, its lyric about refusing an ex who wants to come back into your life: “Now suddenly you’re asking for it back / Could you tell me, where’d you get the nerve? / … But I don’t really care how bad it hurts / When you broke me first.” Given the emotional pull of the song, McRae says she wasn’t feeling at all emotional on the day she wrote it. “It’s actually kind of funny because my headspace wasn’t really in a sad or emotional state,” she says. “And once my subconscious started to speak I started to draw inspiration from past emotions and really get into the zone. It kind of just came out really fast.” After she was nominated for Best New Artist at the 2020 MTV Music Awards, McRae performed the song at the livestreamed ceremony at the end of August. It was a career high for her. “I never thought that I’d be performing an awards show this early,” she says. “It was a huge dream of mine to even get on that stage. So the fact that I was able to get nominated as well as perform was a huge honour. And it was incredible.” The performance took her career up another notch as the song not only gathered millions of streams but rocketed into the music charts across the globe, including a top 20 spot in Australia and the UK – and rising.
With success in both the new world of streaming and the old world of singles charts, coupled with her exceptional talent and unmatched work ethic, McRae is well and truly on track for an impressive pop career . Although she expresses frustration at not being able to tour yet, or meet her fans face to face, she promises more good stuff is coming. “I have a new song coming out in mid-October,” she says. “I’m really excited [because] we filmed a music video and it’s the first professional video I’d been able to film since quarantine. It was pretty cool and I’m very excited to release it.”
‘You Broke Me First’ is out now via Sony Music Australia. You can download on iTunes and stream on Apple Music and Spotify.
To keep up with all things Tate McRae, you can follow her on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter.
Stay tuned for more of our interview with Tate McRae with Women In Pop.
