Tate McRae Defends Working With Morgan Wallen, Despite Backlash

Over the summer of 2025, Tate McRae found herself in hot water. Her fans loudly voiced their disappointment in her once it was revealed she was releasing a collaboration with Morgan Wallen, the controversial country singer with a history of violent outbursts and using racial slurs. McRae stayed silent as the duet “What I Want” dropped on May 20, but now she’s opening up about the negative responses to that collab.

McRae explained that she does not regret the decision to work with Wallen because she views the backlash as a learning experience. “I don’t think you should regret anything in life, because it gives you so much clarity,” McRae said in her Dec. 11 Rolling Stone profile. “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.”

However, the pop star went on to clarify that she has never actually met Wallen in person, and the real determining factor in deciding to feature on his song was its genre. “Honestly, country music is huge where I’m from,” McRae told Rolling Stone. “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. But I honestly just got the opportunity to do a country song, and I was like, ‘Oh, this is cool.’”

She was focused solely on trying something new in her career, so it came as a surprise when fans brought up Wallen’s personal issues. “I wanted to cross genres really bad. It was just about the song for me,” McRae said. “I didn’t realize how much a song would be connected to all the other factors, and it really shocked me.”

Though its release came with some controversy, “What I Want” was a hit, becoming McRae’s first number one debut on the Billboard charts.