On November 16, Tate McRae released the video for “Exes,” which caused a chain reaction among the netizens. Everyone wondered who the girl was whipping her hair and dancing on the bathroom floor. Amidst all this hullabaloo, her “Greedy” had started to gain numbers and rise in the charts, creating a great divide between TikTok and mainstream.
A few days later, she performed it all in real-time on Saturday Night Live, a day later, at the Billboard Music Awards. She proved her haters wrong, no cap. Sitting in a corner office at her Los Angeles management company sporting an oversized red jacket with a black fringe, she says, “My true fans knew I danced, but it was finally for the first time like, is she an industry plant? 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,” according to Variety.
The outlet reports that the young pop singer has been a songwriter, dancer, and singer ever since her 2020 “You Broke Me First” released, which now crosses 1.2 billion streams on Spotify. Her recent hit “Greedy” has surpassed two million TikTok posts and even topped the Billboard Global 200 and Spotify’s Global charts.
Her recent sophomore album Think Later, which was released on Friday, has marked a rebirth of hers of sorts. She marks her entry into the world of the pop music industry with the release of this album. The opener, “Cut My Hair”, clarifies her mission from the very first lines: “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.”
View this post on Instagram
Per Variety, she said, “I was like, god, writing sad songs and being depressing, no one has ever seen a different side of me. 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.”
The outlet also reports that McRae’s Think Later releases after an 11-month long break, “the longest breath she’s taken since she started pursuing dancing seriously as a teen.” She felt lost and did not know how to grow her identity as an artist.
She said, “I’ve been a very intuitive person my whole life, and I totally lost that the past five years. 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.”
Talking about “I Used to Think I Could Fly”, the singer recalls the moments when she simply submitted to the songwriters’ suggestions and tried as many sounds and identities as possible. She said, “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!”
Think Later becomes a way to exert control over her creative genius. Per Variety, the origin of the new album lies in 2000s culture, with “Greedy” being inspired by Nelly Furtado’s “Promiscuous.”
Like all the female artists out there, McRae has also been subjected to some hatred. However, instead of staying in the putrid muck of reading and reacting to the hate comments, the young singer chooses to focus on her art and offer the best that she can to the world.
Per Variety, she said, “I cannot do Twitter. Twitter is the scariest place on earth. My biggest advice is, never search your name on Twitter. 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, and 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.”
Tate McRae’s journey on the Internet has been no less than inspiring. In 2011, she created her YouTube account when she was just 11. She has posted dancing videos since she started training at age six and studied ballet in the years that followed.
In 2017, she started posting original songs on YouTube under the series “Create with Tate.” Her “One Day” went viral, crossing 40 million views to date. By 2019, she had signed with RCA. From there, her journey has always been upward and onward.