Tate McRae can see the future. Just look to the 2023 video where she predicts the exact score the Eagles would win the 2024 Super Bowl with. “I pulled a number out of my ass,” she says with a laugh over Zoom before admitting she does believe she might be a little bit clairvoyant. “I have predicted the future many times before, so maybe it was a true prediction.”
The 21-year-old star’s next prediction? A move to New York City. “I feel like New York is the next section of my life,” McRae says. She’s been watching Sex and the City lately (she’s a Carrie/Charlotte mix) and just bought a new place in lower Manhattan, near one of her favorite restaurants.
“My vibe for 21 is New York. That’s where the magic happens.”
It seems like the magic is wherever McRae happens to be. In December 2023, she released her sophomore album Think Later. It was a major jump for the singer, moving from the moodier bedroom-pop of debut I Used to Think I Could Fly to a more bombastic, confident, sexy dance-pop sound. It worked better than anticipated: lead single “Greedy” rose to Number 3 on the Hot 100 while the album itself debuted in the Top 10.
Last spring, she embarked on a massive world tour, the first where she showed off her years of dance training. As her career exploded, McRae didn’t stop writing. She began working on what would become her third album So Close to What, out on Feb. 21, shortly after Think Later dropped.
“Even though it’s work, writing feels like my safe space,” she explains. “The stable part of my life is when I’m able to talk about my feelings. So, I feel like amidst how crazy the year was on tour, it actually was nice to come home and keep writing about my perspective on where I was at in life.”
An album wasn’t the original goal. She mostly wanted to have a new song to debut during her headlining date at Madison Square Garden last August, her first arena show. She performed “It’s OK I’m OK” during the encore, nearly a year after she first started working on the song.
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“I’d just chipped away at it the whole year and crafted it into the song I wanted to present at Madison Square that night,” she explains.
So Close to What came together this winter. McRae worked with a tight knit group of collaborators: Ryan Tedder, Grant Boutin, Emil Haynie, Lostboy, among them. The most special were Amy Allen and Julia Michaels, both of whom are legendary hitmakers in their own rights.
“They are two of the most incredible women I’ve ever met and are some of the best songwriters I’ve ever been with,” McRae gushes. “It’s honestly just so incredible to gain knowledge from them in songwriting and be around them. It’s so fun to also get another girl’s perspective on moments in a life that can feel so confusing.”
McRae’s entire album is conceptually focused on the confusing parts of her last year growing up amid becoming more famous than ever before. The name So Close to What pulls from her more existential worries: “the idea of not being present at times, feeling like you’re trying to control everything, feeling perceived by so many people, feeling like I’m 21 and the oldest I’ve ever felt but also so young.” Her “purpose” was a heavy thought weighing on the star all year; she wondered why she hadn’t figured it out by now.
“I kept coming across this concept of being like, ‘Well, what are we working towards? What is the goal of this? Because if I keep setting these goals, and then you get to a point in your life and you’re still not satisfied with yourself. When is the moment that you’re satisfied?’ This a never ending loop that I’ve created for myself.”
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She used those big questions as starting points for all her songs. With Allen, she wrote a track called “Purple Lace Bra” about “the beautiful yet harsh reality of being a woman,” she explains. “Sometimes as a girl, there’s a lot a lot of opinions about how you dress, how you act, how you walk into a room. Being 21 and feeling these feelings for the first time, it was amazing to have someone like Amy, who is so solid in herself and such an incredible woman, to be able to help me shape that perspective in the song. She’s also lived through moments like this in her life and has felt that frustration before. I felt like I was able to confide in her and take back the power by writing a song about it.”
On “Nostalgia,” she considered the inability to be present in life and feeling like it’s all passing you by. “One of my favorite lines in that record was ‘And I manifested you would leave/So the day you did I had you beat/Three steps ahead of everything,’” she says. “It captured the [whole] album and feeling that you’re putting up this guard and protecting yourself from getting hurt in the future. It’s a way of not being present in life and not living in the moment because you’re just in fight or flight mode, constantly trying not to hurt yourself.”
Besides the all-star line-up of songwriters and producers who helped shape McRae’s vision with her, she has two special guests appearing on So Close to What. She knew as soon as she wrote “Bloodonmyhands” that she wanted a rap feature and got Flo Milli on the track. “She was the only voice I could hear on it,” McRae says.
The song “I Know Love” is a duet with McRae’s boyfriend The Kid Laroi. The couple, who confirmed their relationship publicly last April, had been wanting to work together for a long time. One day while throwing around ideas in the studio, they finally found the song they were meant to make together.
“I feel like the person you are in a relationship and the person you are in the studio as an artist are very different,” she says. “We were a little nervous singing in front of each other.”
The work never stops for the Canadian star, who was a finalist on So You Think You Can Dance when she was just 13 before signing with her label RCA a year later. Her Miss Possessive Tour is even bigger than her last, with McRae headlining arenas globally from March through November. After years spent writing her music from her bedroom, her live shows have better shaped who she’s become as an artist.
“[Touring] has made me look at music completely different,” she explains. “I never would start a session thinking about a beat or how it makes me feel as a dancer; I’d always think about it as writing a diary entry. So now, as I’m getting older and I’m experiencing shows and how I want them to feel, one of the first things I think about is how it’s going to feel on a stage with people singing it back and the lights and the cameras and the feel of it all.”
For her next tour, McRae is ready to up the stakes. She looks to the sleekness of Rosalía and Kendrick Lamar’s shows for inspiration, mixed with her own love for theater and plot. “I love a start-to-finish storyline,” she muses. “I love constructing how you want the audience to feel at all times. This year I really want to focus on the narrative of everything.”
As she looks to the next year of her life, one that will take her to New York and beyond, McRae feels more centered than ever. She chalks it up to “a lot of self-work” and journaling. “Try to just push the noise aside,” she advises. “In the moment, I’m [asking] ‘What do I want out of life? What do I want to do with my music? How do I want to change things?’ If people have an opinion on that, that’s their choice. If I can sleep well at night thinking about what I’m putting out there, then their opinions don’t matter.”
