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Morgan Wallen is a country singer, almost defiantly so, though he is also popular on a scale that seems to circumvent genre entirely. Each of Wallen’s past two albums spent at least a hundred weeks hovering near the top of the Billboard chart, making him arguably the most commercially successful artist of his era—a sobering statistic for anybody who once dismissed him as a reality-show castoff with a showstopping mullet, warbling about Jack Daniel’s with the kind of fawning devotion Keats once applied to a Grecian urn. In a curious way, Wallen’s cultural power is still being underestimated. In 2022 and 2023, Wallen and Taylor Swift released new albums within five months of each other—him “One Thing at a Time,” her “Midnights.” He outsold her by a significant degree (5.3 million to 3.2 million, according to Forbes). This week, Wallen released his fourth album, “I’m the Problem,” which features thirty-seven songs and fifty songwriters. Odds are, sales will be stratospheric. His connection to his audience may be broad, but it is not anonymous. His point of view is precisely defined: God, Chevy, girls, booze.
Over the past several decades, Wallen’s particular lyrical fascinations have grown impossibly coded, becoming shorthand for an entire world view. But if you can neutralize the intimations, I don’t know—who doesn’t like a good party? Who doesn’t wanna go home with somebody who’s a “little bit angel, whole lotta outlaw,” as Wallen sings on “Cowgirls,” a pining single from “One Thing at a Time”? The vocals are muscular, staunch, and just gritty enough. Wallen has abandoned the panting rasp of his mid-twenties, and now performs with force and depth. On “Sand in My Boots,” he remembers a tryst on the beach, and the deep anguish of leaving someone he cared about behind. But what if he hadn’t? His voice is lush with regret:
Yeah, but now I’m dodging potholes in my sunburnt Silverado
Like a heart-broke desperado, headed right back to my roots
Somethin’ bout the way she kissed me tells me she’d love eastern Tennessee
Yeah, but all I brought back with me was some sand in my boots
On “I’m the Problem,” Wallen holds true to his calling: singing about the ways love can sour. The music here is capably performed but utterly faceless; Wallen is focussed on storytelling, and his milieu is catastrophic heartache. The relationships he favors are irrepressible, lustful, volatile, and unhinged; for Wallen, the only love affair worth having is one that drives you totally nuts. If you can find a way to live without each other—well, maybe you should. (Of course, Wallen can’t.) “I know you packed your shit and slammed the door right before you left / But baby, baby, something’s tellin’ me this ain’t over yet,” he sings on “Last Night,” which spent four straight months atop the Billboard Hot 100 in 2023.
If Wallen’s albums were normal-sized, this might make them feel cohesive, even romantic, but because they are so reliably voluble (“One Thing at a Time” contained thirty-six songs; the bonus edition of “Dangerous: The Double Album,” contained thirty-three), his commitment to romantic chaos becomes exhausting, like consuming one too many hours of a bottom-shelf Bravo series. Wallen has been releasing music for nine years, and most of it is alarmingly interchangeable. There are no major stylistic shifts in his catalogue, merely a statement (and restatement) of purpose: love hurts, whiskey helps. Wallen tries to recall a time when he wasn’t quite so beholden to his vices—“There was a day Jack and Jim didn’t know me from Adam / And Eve wasn’t some what’s-her-name in my bed,” he sings on “Genesis”—but he is mired in a ruinous cycle of debauchery and repentance. “Swear it’s there in my blood / I was born to be lost.”
In March, Wallen appeared on “Saturday Night Live” to perform two songs from the new album, beginning with the title track. It’s a bitter and cutting breakup song, with a seething chorus:
I guess I’m the problem
And you’re Miss Never-Do-No-Wrong
If I’m so awful
Then why’d you stick around this long?
Wallen’s voice has an easy lilt that reminds me of someone distractedly practicing their golf swing in the sporting-goods aisle of a big box store. But here, he sounds sharp, flinty, and cold. The stage set featured concert posters, news clippings, and other bits of Wallen-adjacent ephemera pinned to the walls and dissected with red string; it evoked the home office of an obsessed detective who was about to zero in on the culprit, or lose his marbles entirely. This sort of anger—it’s not my fault, it’s your fault—veers close to juvenalia, and it’s tempting to wish that Wallen, who turned thirty-two this week, would grow up already.
But there’s vulnerability buried in that sort of indignation. Fresh heartbreak often vacillates between anger and hurt, ping-ponging so furiously from one feeling to the other that it can become impossible to tell them apart. The drums are anxious, the guitar is lonesome, and Wallen is pissed because he is sad. (The song reminds me, thematically, of “I Had Some Help,” a coltish duet with Post Malone, from 2024: “You thought I’d take the blame for us a-crumblin’ / Go ’round like you ain’t guilty of somethin’,” Wallen sings on a verse.)
“Just in Case,” the second song Wallen performed on “S.N.L.,” is also concerned with the chaotic ways we attempt to mitigate loss. Here, Wallen indulges in perhaps the most reliable manner of getting over an ex: sleeping with someone else or, as he puts it, partaking in “a little bit of midnight movin’ on.” (Hey, it’s better than crying alone: “I ain’t sayin’ when I do that it don’t help,” he admits.) But Wallen is also holding back in some fundamental way, keeping his heart to himself—he’s simply going through the motions, hoping that the girl he actually loves might come back. “I ain’t felt a damn thing, baby, after us,” he sings. (Having sex with one person while dreaming about another is a common refrain in Wallen’s discography: “When you’re up in his bed, am I up in your head? / Makin’ you crazy?” he wondered on “Thinkin’ Bout Me,” a single from 2023. On “Eyes Are Closed,” a new song, he returns to the idea: “When you’re crawling into bed with the guy you chose / Instead of spending Saturday night alone / Tell me, am I still where your mind’ll go?”)
Musically, “Just in Case” is a trifle—a bland, mid-tempo ballad. Still, Wallen possesses a kind of uncanny magnetism that, for better or worse, can elevate a mediocre song. During one performance on “S.N.L.,” he wore baggy jeans ripped at the knee, a mustache, a thin gold chain, and a camo ball cap with a Harley-Davidson logo. While the women of modern country music have mostly embraced a tradition of glorious peacocking (mountainous hair, fake lashes, tiny shorts, off-season tans), the men seem to be aiming for “some guy you saw at Home Depot”—though this, too, feels strategic, meaningful. There’s something in Wallen’s look that presents as refusal: he does not accept the notion that masculinity requires a softening or an apology. More than any other pop star I can think of, Wallen is a product of his political moment; at times, he has even been a portent. In 2021, he was filmed referring to a friend with a racial slur while drunk and stumbling around Nashville (he later apologized, describing the moment as “hour seventy-two of seventy-two of a bender”); in the immediate aftermath of the event, sales of his second record, “Dangerous: The Double Album,” soared, suggesting (at best) a molten frustration with so-called cancel culture, or (at worst) newfound support for public racism.
At the end of his second “S.N.L.” performance, Wallen yelled, “Praise the Lord and go Vols, baby!” (He was born and brought up in East Tennessee, and is an ardent supporter of the University of Tennessee’s N.C.A.A. basketball team, the Volunteers). A strange thing happened in the final moments of the show. After the host, the actress Mikey Madison, said good night, Wallen gave her a one-armed hug and strode off the stage, toward the camera, without looking back. It’s customary for the musical guest to hang around, beaming and chatting with the cast as the credits roll. So what, you might be thinking. Maybe he had to pee. Yet something about the gesture felt deeply intentional. Later that night, Wallen posted a photo of his private jet (LOL) to Instagram, with the caption, “Get me to God’s country.” He’d had enough of New York City’s craven heathens.
Yet in Wallen’s telling, God’s country isn’t exactly a sacrosanct place, either—the protagonists of “I’m the Problem” are also fucked-up and grasping for answers. Wallen is constantly trying to find new ways to navigate the tension between pleasure and piety, Saturday night and Sunday morning, his horniness and his self-loathing—already the grist for a thousand doleful ballads. Last spring, Wallen was arrested after he hurled a chair from the roof of a six-story bar, nearly braining two cops who were standing on the street below—“Superman,” a song he wrote for his four-year-old son, opens with the line, “One day you’re gonna see my mug shot.” On “I’m a Little Crazy,” which closes the album, Wallen sings about feeling adrift and hopeless:
I’m screaming at a TV that ain’t got ears
On anti-depressants and lukewarm beers
And I do it every night but the news don’t change
Guess I’m a little crazy but the world’s insane
“The news” has an alarmingly fluid definition these days, depending on where you’ve pledged your allegiance, but the general sentiment here—that things have gotten out of control—feels true and sweeping. What are we supposed to cling to when the ground is shaking? Wallen doesn’t know, either, which is maybe the holiest thing about him.
Wallen reunited with Post Malone for “I Ain’t Comin’ Back,” a smooth and beachy tune about splitting town: “But the night I said I’m leavin’, I turned into Richard Petty / Broke my heart so I got even in my ’97 Chevy,” Wallen sings. His voice feels liquid, effortless. (I did not previously think it was possible to make the phrase “I dip Skoal” sound kind of pretty.) It’s hard to say who or what Wallen is running from—a woman, himself, haters—but it feels heady and cathartic when he mashes the accelerator. (Get me to God’s country!) There are a million rock-and-roll songs about bucking against the confines of a stilted or loveless life, choosing possibility over the death rattle of obligation, though the best ones also tend to offer up a little culpability (on “Hungry Heart,” a single from 1980, Bruce Springsteen sang, “I went out for a ride and I never went back / Like a river that don’t know where it’s flowing / I took a wrong turn and I just kept going.”) These two are not quite so ready to cop to self-doubt. On the second verse, Posty sings:
Girl, it ain’t my fault
Ain’t no need to wait three days
I might be a lot of things
But I ain’t your savin’ grace
Wallen also partnered with the TikTok ingénue turned pop star Tate McCrae, who, incredibly, is the first woman ever featured on one of his songs. (It’s an unexpected pairing, in part because McCrae is beloved for her dancing, whereas when Wallen performs, he tends to plant his feet and glower.) “What I Want” is about two people letting each other off the hook: no commitment, no compromise, forget emotional accountability, who cares. “There ain’t no hard feelings if you only wanna act like lovers do,” McCrae sings. They harmonize on the chorus: “Only stay a couple nights, then she gon’ be gone / I said baby, you should know that’s what I want.” The union feels more desperate than carnal, which I suppose is often the case when the stakes are nonexistent (“You don’t want this heart, boy, it’s already broke”). Sex—like bourbon, or driving fast—is one path to oblivion, but, unfortunately, you are still yourself when the buzz dies down.
The songs on “I’m the Problem” are sometimes wanton or unbearably corny (I wish there was a way to erase the lyric “Be a friend like Skoal / Always there in a pinch” from my conscious mind), but they are mostly about consequences, which also makes them interesting. Wallen, for all his bluster, spends most of this record pining—there was a girl, but she got away, and everything, all the singing and the drinking and the rage and the regret, is oriented toward her. “Why, why, why in the hell / Do I keep sayin’ I can get ya back?” he laments on “Lies Lies Lies.” “Mighta slept ten hours in about three days / She got that kinda power,” he worries on “Crazy Eyes.” At times, his yearning gives him the twitchy and unpredictable energy of a wounded animal. Yet it’s poignant, too. Maybe that’s what Wallen actually meant by “God’s country”—a state of limitless and requited love. A kind of home. ♦
Sourse: newyorker.com
