Tate McRae was not expecting all of the criticism she received after collaborating with Morgan Wallen.
“Honestly, country music is huge where I’m from,” McRae, 22, told Rolling Stone for her cover story published on Thursday, December 11 — referring to her hometown of Calgary, Canada. “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.”
McRae said when she was asked to be featured on Wallen’s single “What I Want,” she just thought it was a “cool” opportunity.
“But I honestly just got the opportunity to do a country song, and I was like, ‘Oh, this is cool.’ And I wanted to cross genres really bad,” she explained to the outlet. “It was just about the song for me. I didn’t realize how much a song would be connected to all the other factors, and it really shocked me.”
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In May, McRae’s collaboration with Wallen, 32, on “What I Want” caused a lot of backlash from her fans after his controversial past. (Some of Wallen’s past issues include being suspended by his record label in February 2021 after a video emerged of him saying a racial slur and throwing a chair off the roof of a Nashville bar in 2024.)
“Hey maybe avoid people like Morgan Wallen,” one user wrote via Instagram on one of McRae’s posts while another wrote, “I was rooting for you, we were all rooting for you! How dare you?”
While McRae did not respond to the criticism at the time, she admitted on Thursday that she never even met Wallen in person — but she doesn’t “regret” doing the duet with him.
“I don’t think you should regret anything in life, because it gives you so much clarity,” she told Rolling Stone. “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.”
While McRae enjoyed their collaboration, Wallen previously discussed how he was also excited to feature McRae on his song.
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“My sister turned me on to Tate and her music a few years ago and I’ve been a fan ever since. She is a true pop star, a prolific songwriter and is also an extremely underrated vocalist,” he said in an interview with Billboard in May. “We have known each other for a couple years and have been talking about doing a song together if the right one came about.”
Although Wallen noted that “What I Want” wasn’t intended to be a duet, after “listening to it a few times,” he kept thinking of McRae as “someone that would really give the song a dynamic element that I felt it deserved.”
Wallen most recently made headlines last week when he seemingly dissed the CMA Awards after receiving an end of year honor from Apple Music.
“I like my fans to do the talking,” Wallen wrote via Instagram Story alongside a screenshot of Apple Music announcing that his album “I’m the Problem” was the music streaming service’s “most-listened-to project” of 2025.
Wallen’s comments came after he lost Entertainer of the Year at the 2025 CMA Awards last month. (Lainey Wilson ended up taking home the award.)