Morgan Wallen ft. Tate McRae – What I Want

Give it to me baby like boo, boo, boooooooo…

[Video]
[3.23]

Wayne Weizhen Zhang: In 2025, it takes a coalition of Morgan Wallen’s Big 10 frat boys and country fans who casually overlook racism, along with Tate McRae’s 14-year-old Regina George wannabes and gay men in their 30s, to go number 1 on Billboard. Congrats on working across the aisle, folks!
[3]

Andrew Karpan: At last, what we all want: Wallen’s “First Duet With a Woman,” in a career that has stretched languorously, irreverently and irrelevantly through a decade of mass culture foggily “turning country.” McRae sounds fine, her verses buried over a minute into the record and introduced by a vaguely cowardly backbeat, as if to let Wallen’s diligently streaming fans know that it will be okay and that she will not be making any more appearances in his latest 37-track ode to himself. Lots of nothing for sure, though her Miley impersonation eventually works by sheer insistence after she repeats it two or three times.
[5]

Al Varela: 2025 continues its pattern of the big hits from good artists being their laziest efforts, and Morgan Wallen skips working with a woman in country music to instead pull the least interesting pop girlie of the decade for a mediocre duet. It’d be one thing if Wallen got a vocalist who fully outshines him, but Tate McRae’s hollow, dead-eyed performance and Wallen’s stumbling brays are a terrible combination. They sound outright awful together on the chorus, barely on the same plane. A hookup between two broken souls could have been compelling song in another life, but the one we got has brittle guitar strums and a hideously out-of-place trap beat that doesn’t convey any sense of danger or allure. I’m willing to stand up for a lot of Wallen songs — including many on this album! — but I can’t deny that this one’s a disaster.
[3]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: I direly underrated the Morgan Wallen-Post Malone cohabitation from last year; Alberta’s finest reveals just how bad this sort of marriage of convenience can go. This is a pop-country crossover with none of the useful qualities of either genre; all I can see in its future is the addition of an EDM drop and an eternity playing on frat rows at 11:45 AM.
[2]

Melody Esme: I can’t fathom why anyone wants to listen to these two on their own. Together, they’re like a bag of ice poured into a deep fryer.
[1]

Julian Axelrod: Tate slots into country-trap surprisingly well, and I’m not as offended by the idea of a Wallen-McRae merger as the internet seems to be. (I live in Chicago, so I’m familiar with the mustache and backwards cap bf/hockey jersey gf dynamic.) But a duet about mutual lack of commitment between two artists who aren’t known for their passion is inevitably going to feel low-stakes. Also, Tate McRae looks like she should be named Morgan Wallen, and Morgan Wallen looks like he should be named Tate McRae. Tell me I’m wrong!
[5]

Katherine St. Asaph: Adam Levine: You Shouldn’t Have Made Fun of My Instagram Sexts
[2]

Mark Sinker: Anxious emotional pre-nup for ill-advised one-night stand: the two worst people you know just made a half-wise call. Heartbreaking addendum: Tate is by no means the worst person you know.
[4]

Dave Moore: How to reconcile my Tate McRae “this is kind of bad, but that’s why it’s good” critique with my Morgan Wallen “this is kind of good, but that’s why it’s bad” critique? When Tate McRae singing, I hear a bold new Trap Daniels direction for the best pure phonics pop star (like the science of reading, but for A-pop). And when Morgan Wallen is singing…ah, hell, it’s not so bad.
[5]

Nortey Dowuona: Somewhere Charlie Handsome is trying to erase all of Jamil “Digi” Chammas’s credits so he can lay claim to being the sole producer of actually good songs such as this.
[3]

Hannah Jocelyn: “I Ain’t Comin’ Back” is an [8], despite my better judgement. I love the atmospheric, bizarrely spacious production, tonally closer to the mixes on John Mayer’s Continuum (say what you will about the man or his music, no really please do, that album sounds spectacular) than the overly bright, compressed stuff of country’s last decade. This starts off promisingly in the same direction, and the guitar riff reminds me of “Stolen Car” by Beth Orton for some reason. Then we go into the identikit trap present drums, and we’re more or less back to the usual. It’s a little sad that the most famous country star is so nihilistic and downtrodden, kind of like how Republicans won the culture war and still feel like victims. There’s no joy here, and he’s not even trying to make himself lovable or feign sensitivity. He’s just churning out slop, and any good moments are the result of infinite Nashville songwriters writing infinite songs.
[3]

Taylor Alatorre: Albums with 30-plus tracks used to be the coin of the outsider artist with a direct connection to the numinous realms of sound; Morgan Wallen has something like that, except his muses dole out their inspiration in rhyme notebooks and color-coded spreadsheets. If he is channeling a spirit, it’s nothing more or less than the unspoken collective desire for a Wallen-like figure — the backwoods Byronic hero whose love spills over the edges and who drinks just up to the line of irredeemability. That desire is a renewable resource, and so the weirdly era-defining success of Wallen was probably overdetermined, a word which here means “something that would’ve happened even if a normally bro-averse cohort of music writers hadn’t gassed up Montevallo a bit too much.” Still, it is the job of the historian to seek out causes, just as it is the job of Tate McRae to stand there and pout thinkpiecely as the machinery whirrs around her.
[3]

Leah Isobel: I like the trebly mix and the delicate descending guitar line, but I’m confused about why this exists. Tate’s whole thing is plastic-and-taffy, gravitas-free whiffs at 2000s pop; she’s Tinashe without the psychedelic and spiritual dimensions, so without the things that make Tinashe interesting. I like her for that, but she doesn’t seem in the same universe as Morgan’s galactic self-pity. One could imagine that they’re both playing at what they think the other person wants: Morgan imagines that his sadsack routine lends him mystery and weight, Tate assumes that she can play the role of the object and go back to her life once she’s satisfied. I find that thoroughly, dismally pedestrian.
[3]