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It’s well established that young adults go through an evolution of sorts as they come to terms with who they are and how they want to express themselves. But very few are required to evolve on a public stage. Watching 21-year-old Canadian pop songstress Tate McRae gracefully and purposefully descend the stairs on-set for her new Adidas Sportswear campaign for Lightblaze sneakers, it’s clear that she has had years of experience posing under this level of scrutiny. The L.A. studio is bustling on an October afternoon, a who’s who of Gen Z pop girlies (McRae’s peers) is blasting on the sound system to set the mood. In the middle of it all, McRae is ferried back and forth from the set to her dressing room, unfazed. She looks like a natural.
But when the crew breaks for lunch, McRae tells George V Magazine that sometimes these kinds of shoots are harder for her because of how pared back they are compared to performing. “Give me choreography and I’m much better,” she says, laughing. As a dancer who was first introduced to us on So You Think You Can Dance in 2016 (the aptly dubbed “next gen” season) at only 12 years old, McRae can hit complicated routines no problem. But just walking down a flight of stairs? That’s when she can end up stuck in her head.
The performer moved to L.A. from Calgary when she was 17 and has spent the last four years carving out a spot for herself next to stars like Charli XCX, Olivia Rodrigo and Billie Eilish. The night before we sat down with the singer, she was a surprise guest on stage at Charli XCX and Troye Sivan’s co-headlining The Sweat Tour. McRae and Troye Sivan sang their song “You,” which McRae says was an unbelievable experience. “When I wrote that song I didn’t even know what a Corvette was,” she says, referring to the lyrics of the song. “I wrote it so quickly in my bedroom back in Calgary, so it was a very cool, full-circle [moment] to pop out at one of the craziest tours I’ve seen in so long.”
McRae’s music has come a long way since posting videos to YouTube at 13, but she says writing has always been her way of connecting with her emotions. “My music has gone through so many different phases,” she says. “I think your music is always a reflection of where you’re at as a person.” McRae started posting songs online to both practice playing the piano and to work through her intense feelings as a teenager. She refers to this phase as “bedroom pop,” and says it was “really dark” and that she was influenced by artists like The Weeknd and The Neighbourhood. “I loved those sounds, and then I feel like I came to L.A. and got a little confused for a second,” she says.
McRae’s music and fashion have evolved at the same pace as she’s worked through her identity as an artist. When she moved to L.A., she says she took a step back and to try to figure out how she was going to make her dancing and singing work together. “And that was a big light bulb in my head, because it made me actually go and do my research,” she says. “I had been around so much music as a dancer, but I hadn’t actually done a deep dive in music really.” McRae started listening to dance records and exploring beats to figure out why she wanted to dance to each sound, and, in-turn, that influenced her as a songwriter—something that, up until that point, she says, had always occupied a separate part of her brain.
“My writer side and my dancer brain are completely different to me,” she says. “I’m a Cancer, which is a very sensitive, intuitive, emotional [sign]. That’s always where my music came from—my inability to communicate through words, so needing to write about it in songs, to let people know how I was feeling. And my dancer side was just very athletic, super serious and work-ethic based. I never even associated it with emotions.”
When she finally brought the two halves of her identity together, McRae noticed that her style began to change on stage. “Walking into this industry, you get a lot of different people telling you what kind of style you need to have and what kind of person you need to be,” she says. For a while she felt she was just experimenting with different styles that didn’t fully encapsulate who she was. “I remember when I was 16, all I wanted to do was wear baggy clothes and big T-shirts, and I didn’t want to experiment with anything. And then I came out to L.A. and I started dressing in hot pink dresses and very girly. And I was like, ‘This is not me. I am way more tomboy than this,’” she says. However, in the past year, when her dancing and singing started to come together more naturally, she also started to prioritize feeling feminine yet cool in her style. She began wearing “whatever made me feel like a badass on stage, regardless of if anyone liked it,” she says. “If I just walked out and felt cool, that’s what I would usually throw on. So it was usually pretty sporty, but a touch of a feminine side to it.”
Obviously, things are more elevated when you’re on stage, she points out—there are sparkles and leather and everything is shiny and colourful to draw the eye. But at home, McRae is much more laid back. “That’s why I feel very honoured to work with a brand like Adidas,” she says, “because when I’m at home, when I’m writing and it’s just me in my safe spot–it’s just me, Tate—I feel like that’s when comfortable clothes are all that I wear, and sneakers, these shoes I wear, literally, 24/7,” she says pointing to the LightBlazes on her feet.
According to McRae, Adidas was a brand she had written in her journal as a dream company to work with, and now that she’s accomplished her latest goal, she’s looking ahead to the future. Up next? A long-awaited new album, So Close to What, which dropped on February 21, which marks the next phase of her music evolution. By the time it reaches our ears, though, McRae says she’ll be on to the next thing. “All I do is think about where I want to go and what my music needs to be better,” she says. “It’s so crazy because as soon as I release music, I never listen to it again because I’m a year ahead of everyone else and my taste has changed drastically.” Still, the forthcoming album will be the most mature of her discography so far. McRae says she feels that it’s more refreshing and cohesive compared to her other bodies of work, calling it “new to her ears” with beats that are super satisfying to a dancer.
It’s no secret that young female artists are constantly under pressure to innovate and transform themselves to keep the public engaged, but McRae has a very mature and grounded outlook of the industry. “I think it’s a very common pressure, especially amongst women nowadays—especially with the internet period. One person does one thing and they don’t satisfy this group of people, and then you try to do something else and it doesn’t satisfy this group of people. It’s like you can perfect everything about yourself, or try at least, and nobody’s ever gonna be really happy with it,” she says. McRae admits that the pressure can feel weighted at times because as an artist and a person you may be trying to figure out your life, who you are or what your sound is but she also thinks that if you’re internally motivated then it can become a catalyst to improve. “I think you can always learn and become a better person, become a better artist, learn more, get more knowledge, try to master as many things as you can think. If it’s a pressure coming from inside, it’s a great thing.”
At a young age and in LA no-less, McRae has managed to pinpoint a philosophy that would set many of us free. “I’ve realized everything is timeless to me when it’s authentic,” she says of both her music and personal style. Regardless of whether or not her clothing is considered “in” or “out”, McRae says as long as it is in keeping with her personality and who she is, she doesn’t regret it and never will. The same goes for her work as an artist. She’s learned things start to fall apart when you try to impress people or appeal to certain trends. “If it was in line with what I liked, then it doesn’t change for me. I will appreciate it five years later, 10 years later,” she says. “I think you start to honestly choose things that you like, and put yourself in positions, in places that you like, you end up living a much easier life. I think authenticity is literally just the key to feeling good about your work at the end of the day.”