Tate McRae had no shortage of hits in 2025. One of them, "What I Want," a collaboration with country star Morgan Wallen, was a crossover hit for the Calgary-born pop star, who found herself at the top of the country charts for the first time.
Teaming up with Wallen, who has earned a problematic reputation for yelling a racial slur in public and getting arrested for throwing a chair off a rooftop bar, seems to have sparked a backlash that she admits she didn't see coming.
Speaking to Rolling Stone, the 22-year-old expressed how excited she was to dip her toes into country music, being an Alberta-born, long-time fan of the genre.
“Honestly, country music is huge where I’m from,” Tate says. “My brother’s always been a rabid country-music fan. I’ve always wanted, at some point in my life, to do folk music or country, and I probably still will in the future."
For her, getting the chance to work with one of country's biggest artists was something she couldn't turn down. The fact that it caused such a stir was not something she expected.
"I honestly just got the opportunity to do a country song, and I was like, ‘Oh, this is cool,'" she explains. "And I wanted to cross genres really bad. It was just about the song for me. I didn’t realize how much a song would be connected to all the other factors, and it really shocked me.”
Tate says she still hasn't even met Wallen in person, but she has no regrets over working with him.
“I don’t think you should regret anything in life, because it gives you so much clarity,” she adds. “I think controversy and criticism is a way of learning and figuring out what you want to move forward with, and how that shapes you as a person. I think it’s all important.”
Read the full interview here.