Tate McRae was born in Calgary, the city that hosts the Calgary Stampede every summer, and she has called country music a lifelong love.
When she teamed up with Morgan Wallen, some of her own fans turned on her for it.
Now she is answering them. In a W Magazine cover interview, McRae pushed back against the backlash over “What I Want,” her duet from Wallen’s 2025 album I’m The Problem. The print issue arrives on October 27.
When the magazine asked her about the duet, she answered with the bigger picture.
“It’s cr𝐚zy to think that one song could define a whole person. There are many aspects of my personality that three-quarters of my audience has no idea about. You hope one day you figure out a way to show all aspects of it.”
That is a pop star telling most of her own audience they have only met part of her.
W Magazine wrote that the duet led people to make political assumptions about her by proxy. McRae told the magazine that because the work she is doing is pop music, people perceive her personality, or her brain, in a specific way.
She has answered this before. In a Variety cover story in August, she said she prefers to let her actions speak for her, pointing to the organizations she supports and the environment she keeps on tour, and she said she hopes her fans can see what kind of person she is through the things she puts her energy toward.
Wallen has never said anything about the controversy.
Morgan Wallen Had Been Turned Down for a Duet Before Tate McRae Said Yes
Before this song, Wallen had wanted to record a duet with a woman, and “What I Want” did not start out as one. At the end of 2023, he told Billboard he had asked and been turned down.
“I’ve reached out to a couple of people, and they’ve turned me down,” he said at the time.
For You
He promised to keep trying to write songs for it. He also said his sister turned him on to McRae’s music a few years earlier and that he had been a fan ever since, calling her a true pop star, a prolific songwriter and an extremely underrated vocalist.
After listening to the song a few times, he said, she kept coming to his mind as someone who would give it the dynamic element he felt it deserved.
It debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100, her first No. 1 and his fourth, and it ended the 13-week run of Kendrick Lamar and SZA’s “luther” at the top. It also made McRae only the seventh Canadian woman ever to top the Hot 100, following Anne Murray, Alannah Myles, Celine Dion, Avril Lavigne, Nelly Furtado and Carly Rae Jepsen.
One song put her in that company.
Tate McRae’s Country Roots Run Back to the Calgary Stampede
Most of the world knows McRae from pop. Her 2025 album So Close to What topped the albums chart, and her breakthrough single “Greedy” reached No. 3 on the Hot 100. When Rolling Stone asked her about the duet controversy, though, she went back to where she grew up, and she said her love of country music is lifelong because she grew up with the Calgary Stampede in her backyard.
On July 5, she played her first hometown show at the Stampede’s Cowboys Music Festival. She told the crowd she had put the show off for years, and she sang “Calgary,” from her 2023 album Think Later, in Calgary for the first time.
“There’s so many memories, and you know things in my brain that I associate with this place, so many songs I’ve written about this place,” she said from the stage.
She also told the crowd she felt so proud to be from Calgary.
Tate McRae has sung on a No. 1 record with Morgan Wallen and on her hometown stage in Calgary, and she once described herself to Rolling Stone this way. “Tate is this very introspective, very sensitive, very introverted, awkward Canadian.”
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