INTERVIEW: Tate McRae releases her debut album 'I Used To Think I Could Fly': "A lot of artists don't ever play the victim when writing music...I feel like I was pointing out all my flaws"
Interview: Jett Tattersall
Image: Lissyelle Laricchia
Canada’s Tate McRae has emerged as one of the biggest, most talented young singers on the planet in the past few years. Still only nineteen, in many ways she has spearheaded the current movement in pop that is seeing young women taking back the power in their creative process and creating music that authentically and honestly relays the experience of teenagers and young women in their early 20s, from no-one’s perspective but their own. Releasing her first single at 2017, she has was one of the first in a generation of singers that has also produced stars like Billie Eilish and Olivia Rodrigo.
Her defining moment came in late 2020, when mid-pandemic she scored a massive global mainstream hit when her single, the heartbreaking ballad ‘You Broke Me First’, broke into the top 10 on the Australian and UK singles charts and also made the top 20 in the US.
Today she reaches a career milestone with the release of her debut album I Used to Think I Could Fly. Like everything she has done so far in her career, it is a remarkably assured collection of music and it is difficult to believe it is her very first album. Preceded by the singles ‘Feel Like Shit’, ‘She’s All I Wanna Be’, ‘Chaotic’ and ‘What Would You Do’ the album maintains her commitment to fluidity in terms of genre, with a mix of piano, electronica, pop-punk, gentle ballads and traditional pop. Mainstream success hasn’t comprised her musical foundation, and her raw honesty and insight into her personal experiences is still front and centre across the 13 tracks.
Off the back of her debut album, McRae will be touring Australia and New Zealand for the first time ever this July. She is a seriously exciting performer who has everything it takes to be one of this generation’s biggest stars. Not only is she capable of creating stand out, first class pop music that can move you to tears and then make you want to dance it all out, she is a hypnotic performer who has a charisma and presence second to none. We recently caught up with her to chat more about I Used to Think I Could Fly and her upcoming tour.
Hi Tate, so good to chat to you again. Oh my god, you've made a delicious debut album. I'm so excited, well done. How are things with you these days?
So busy, but it's been the most surreal, amazing experience I could have ever asked for. So I'm very pumped!
You have always been so present with your music, and you've always been very connected to your audience. I want to ask you a couple of questions about some of the songs on I Used to Think I Could Fly. There's a song on the track ‘hate myself’ and I just got chills, absolute chills. And the way you recorded it is something else, I feel like I'm in your brain. Can you talk me through that song?
That song was really, really hard to write, it was probably the most vulnerable song I've ever written. I had just gone through a breakup that day and so it was really fresh in my brain, the whole situation. I was sobbing as I was recording the song. A lot of artists don't ever play the victim when writing music, and it was really scary. I feel like I was pointing out all my flaws in in this song. And that's a really guilty, crazy thing to experience.
That's so true, and that's one of the reasons why you resonate with people because you've always been accountable for experiences, you've always owned up to them. Have you always been that level headed as a person and self aware?
I feel like I've always had an old soul ever since I was like nine. Everyone's always told me that I have the brain of a 50 year old. I have no filter and I'm a very observant person, so as much as I'm going to be observing everyone around me, I also know myself super well and I know everything that's great about myself. I also know what I do when I have to cope with things and I am the type of person that if anyone does hurt me or anyone does affect me in any way the first thing I do is push away from them to protect myself and that's something that I admitted to in this song. It's like I sometimes end up isolating myself from everybody just because I have a really hard time trusting people.
You have this honesty and this sense of perspective, not just with ‘hate myself’, but other tracks on the album, you're speaking more from experience. When you had 'you broke me first', it was a breakup song but it wasn’t necessarily your experience. As you experiencing more and more as you're getting older, does it change the way you write as well?
Yeah, like I said, I'm very observant, so I can take situations from friends. I mean, ‘you broke me first’ was written about multiple people, but in very small ways. I have ways of expanding that in my brain and turning it into a song, because I just have a very clear perspective on it. I've always been really good at that, observing everything around me and being able to process it into writing. I'm bad at explaining it as a person, so the only way that I was able to do that was through music.
'she's all I wanna be' explores the tricky web that is female envy. There's this patriarchal stamp that people have on women, particularly young women, that unless they're friends, they're cat fighting, however envy is still very much a thing.
Yeah, it's so interesting because I feel like jealousy and the feelings of wanting to be anyone else other than yourself are so evident right now, because social media is stuffed in our face 24/7. When I wrote this song. I had been scrolling on Instagram and TikTok for hours and I didn't even realise that I was putting myself in this horrible mood, but I was. I walked into the session in a pissy mood, I started writing and the first thing I wrote was ‘she's got everything that I don't have, how could I ever compete with that?’ Jealousy is something that everyone feels on a daily basis, but everyone hates to admit it. I wanted to show people that it's a very normal thing to go through and that if you realise it's normal, it's going to be less of a horrible feeling to experience. It’s a super vulnerable song that I think people need to hear, because a lot of girls, I didn't even realise, feel that way. I can see it in my concerts now, they all they all scream that song like there's nothing else to say!
Can you talk me through the video? Because it's so funny and so beautiful
My mum's been my dance teacher my whole life, and we were watching A Chorus Line one day and I'm like, ‘this would be an insane video’. 'she's all I wanna be' is all about comparison, so I started drawing back to me living through the toxicity of dance auditions my entire life and [thought] it would be insane to replicate. There's so many kids my age who haven't seen these films, and haven't seen the message of these iconic movies and I'm like, it would be really crazy to bring it up. Creating it and all the visuals, and the dancing with it was just so so fun.
Lastly, before I leave you Tate, you're going to be touring all over the world, your album is out, what else is coming up for you?
I'm touring with Shawn Mendes at the end of the year, which I'm so excited about. I get to perform my full album for the first time on stage, which will be very wild. I'm excited. I'm travelling the world this year and I'm so grateful and lucky. I'm just excited to take it all in and just be present as much as I can.
I Used to Think I Could Fly is out now via RCA Records/Sony Music. You can buy and stream here.
To keep up with all things Tate McRae, you can follow her on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok and Twitter.
More of our interview with Tate McRae will be in issue 12 of Women In Pop magazine. Subscribe now to get your copy in July.
Listen to our podcast with Tate McRae here.
