At only 21 years old, pop singer-songwriter Tate McRae has already achieved incredible worldwide success. As of this writing, she has had 12.4 billion career streams, and 14 of her singles have made the charts in her native Canada and multiple other countries (where they’ve reached Gold or Platinum sales status). She was the youngest musician featured on the Forbes “30 Under 30” list in 2021. And last year, she won the JUNO Artist of the Year award.
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So McRae had a lot on the line as she created her third studio album—but that process turned out to be quite demanding, because she had to find a way to do it while extensively touring the world throughout 2024. “It was a very crazy process writing in between tour dates, and flying in and out, and getting into the studio whenever I had free time,” McRae says, during a video call from her Los Angeles home.
But, she adds, she relished this situation: “It’s always a really good challenge to be able to have deadlines and to put together a project, just because I feel like it kind of forces me to realize where I’m at in life, currently,” she says. “The only way to find perspective on anything, for me, is to write. It’s literally just my biggest form of therapy.”
McRae’s perseverance has resulted in So Close to What, which was released on February 21 via RCA Records. The 15-track album features some of her most vulnerable yet bold lyrics to date, blended with bold and danceable pop hooks.
“I feel like this album title just very much reflected my headspace right now as a 21-year-old,” McRae says of So Close to What. “It’s really interesting because I feel like this [past] year, as I didn’t feel like a teenager anymore and really, truly felt like an adult for the first time, I started to realize this whole process of being in this [music] industry and just being a human, you’re living on this never-ending street.”
This means, she explains, that “you have to define where your milestones are, and what makes you happy, and how you move to the next spot in your life, because no one decides that for you. I feel like in life, you realize that there’s absolutely no one telling you how you’re doing or where you’re going or where you’re at except for yourself. That is a really interesting realization to have.”
But, she adds, she didn’t go into this album with that particular theme in mind. Instead, she says, “I felt like it was a lot of like, ‘Let’s just create from scratch in the room and see where the ideas come from.’ But a lot of my best thinking comes from boredom, or when I’m by myself. I just felt like I tried to take a lot more time this year to be with my thoughts in silence and just see what came about.
“Sometimes I’ll walk in and just freestyle on the mic and just subconsciously see whatever comes out, what words are floating in my freestyle, and we can start a song like that,” she continues. “Or sometimes I come in with a very specific title and a concept of where I want to go. But it really depends on the mood of the day and how I’m feeling and who I’m working with.”
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For this album, McRae credits the writer/producers Amy Allen, Ryan Tedder, and Julia Michaels, in particular, for helping her achieve her goals. “It’s a lot of experimentation,” she says of working with them. “It’s figuring out who you gel with. It’s figuring out who brings the best out of you. I feel very lucky because my collaborators, I think, are the coolest and most inspiring people in the world.”
At first, McRae had seemed destined for a different kind of artistic life when, at a very young age, she decided she was going to become a professional ballerina. She admits that the requisite skills for this didn’t come easily to her, however.
“I started off not with that much natural ability or talent as a dancer, [but] I think the one thing I had above everybody else was that I was like, ‘I’m going to outwork everybody’—I said that to my mom at eight years old,” she says. “I would wake up at five a.m. and do crunches and stretch and watch my [ballerina] idols on YouTube. I think that made me really excited and motivated for life, reaching different goals and milestones as a dancer. I think that was what always made me feel good—I was always up for a challenge in that sense. If someone told me that it was impossible, I was going to make sure that it wasn’t.”
Her determination paid off. After extensive ballet training, she went on to win several prestigious international dance competitions. In 2016, at only 12 years old, she traveled to Los Angeles to compete on the popular television show So You Think You Can Dance; she ended up advancing to third place by the final episode.
Being on that show was thrilling for McRae, so she felt restless and bored after she returned to her home in Calgary, Alberta. To alleviate this, she created a YouTube channel, “Create with Tate,” where she posted choreography videos.
One day, one of those videos wasn’t working out, so she quickly pivoted: “I went into my room and wrote this song [“One Day”] in 30 minutes. It went viral the next day,” she says. That unexpected success led her to continue posting more songs on her channel.
Though she had taught herself how to play some piano chords and had recently started writing her own songs, McRae admits that her ambition exceeded her knowledge at this point. “I didn’t know the structure of a pop song,” she says. “I didn’t know who wrote songs, or how people wrote songs. I literally just had no idea about anything.”
She soon turned her naivete into a positive, however. “In a sense, the idea of ‘ignorance is bliss’ was kind of on my side because I just wrote whatever felt right, and just whatever was on the tip of my tongue. So it was very much just subconscious writing.”
McRae’s lyrics were what she terms “extremely honest,” where she wrote about feelings she wouldn’t normally feel comfortable confessing. “All I wanted was to just express my emotions, and I had no idea how to talk about it because I was so bad with words, so the only way I could communicate was by posting it on YouTube for everybody in the world to see!” she says with a laugh.
Though McRae has always liked listening to a wide array of styles, when it came to writing her own material, she gravitated toward creating pop music. “I just have a soft spot for it. I feel like as a dancer, I always want to move to pop music,” she says. “Some of my biggest idols were in the pop space. I also just feel like you can kind of do whatever you want [in that genre]—I don’t really feel like there’s a limit with it, which is what excites me.”
She remained passionate about posting her songs—even when she seemed to be the only one who thought pursuing a singer-songwriter career was a good idea. “I feel like I was in a bit of a rebellious teenage phase of my life where everybody told me I shouldn’t, and that it was an impossible dream, and I—the pretty ambitious kid—was like, ‘I’m going to make it possible.’”
McRae’s belief in herself proved well-founded: her YouTube videos got the attention of multiple record companies. She signed a deal with RCA Records, then released a pair of EPs, All the Things I Never Said (2020) and Too Young to Be Sad (2021). Her debut full-length studio album, I Used to Think I Could Fly, followed in 2022. By the time she released her second album, Think Later (2023), she had become one of the most successful artists on the international pop scene.
Despite this enormous success, McRae still struggled with her uncertainty over how to reconcile her two passions, music and dance. “I had no idea how they fit together, because my music was pretty vulnerable and emotional and slow tempo. I didn’t know how to make my dancing work with that, so I felt like I had these two different identities that couldn’t coincide with each other,” she says.
Then, about a year and a half ago, McRae finally had a breakthrough moment when she had a conversation with songwriters Allen and Tedder. She told them, “It’s that time in my life where I want to go full pop.” It was as if, she says, “the dancer inside of me is begging to come out, so I feel like it was just a natural progression.”
Fans will get the chance to see how McRae’s music has evolved when So Close to What comes out, and as she embarks on an extensive world tour from March through September to support it. “It’s my first ever arena tour, which has been a lifelong dream of mine,” McRae says.
“Every time I write music, I’m always envisioning how it would come across in a concert and how I would perform it—that’s been so exciting to me,” she says. “That’s been the most exciting part for me, is taking these songs that come from a really vulnerable place and making them into a full-on dance show with lots of lights and dynamics and storytelling and theatrics. That’s been the fun part about transitioning into full pop, really being able to tap into different characters inside of me as a performer.”
She’s also excited to show audiences how she’s evolved as a songwriter, as well: “Now I feel like as I’m older, obviously the music’s growing with me; I’m writing about more mature concepts that I would never, ever talk about before. It feels a bit more reflective on my life. It feels a bit more introspective.”
And, she adds, this new stage in her life, and with her music, reflects how she’s “realizing lots of things about my career this year, and how I felt about constantly wanting to do more, and be more, and get better—and how that feeling sometimes just never ends.”
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