Why Tate McRae says her viral hit Greedy terrified her at first
The Canadian pop star also shares why she never wants to write a song with the intention of it being on TikTok
Tate McRae has just come off one of the biggest weekends of her career. The 20-year-old singer-songwriter from Calgary recently performed her viral hit Greedy at the Billboard Music Awards as well as on Saturday Night Live. Greedy, the first single off McRae's new album Think Later, has been streamed more than 330 million times since its release on Sept. 15.
For a long time, McRae says she's found it impossible to combine her love for dancing and singing.
"I'm a songwriter deep down inside, and this is my therapy," she tells Q's Tom Power. "But I'm also a dancer, and I just had no idea how to put those two worlds together. I was going to the studio every day being like, 'I want to write a song that I can dance to.'"
Greedy was born out of a week-long writing session with Ryan Tedder of OneRepublic, songwriter Amy Allen and producer Jasper Harris.
"On the last day, we're like, 'OK, let's do something totally different," says McRae. "Just see what we can do in a really short amount of time and [with] no f–ks given.' So then we started going back to old 2000s references, like Nelly Furtado and old Britney [Spears] songs."
McRae says she and Tedder found inspiration for Greedy from listening to Timbaland songs.
"We started making this beat and we started playing around with the story. We're rapping in the back, throwing out ideas, painting this picture of a guy coming up to the bar. It was so fun. We made it so [fast]."
But it took months of convincing for McRae to release Greedy as a single.
"I remember Ryan [Tedder] for multiple months, would try to convince me to release this song," she recalls. "And I was like, 'Ryan, this is the scariest song ever. It's so different for me.' It just really terrified me. And he was like, 'Hey, you have to give it a chance.' And then finally, I came around to it."
WATCH | Official video for Greedy:
'The death of art'
Despite the success of Greedy on TikTok, McRae says she never approaches songwriting through the lens of creating a perfect 15-second clip.
"If I'm being super honest, I feel like whenever someone, like a songwriter, walks into a room and [goes], 'We need to make something that's going to catch on TikTok,' it fully kills it for me," she tells Power. "I think that is the death of art. If we're basing a song off of a 15-second clip, I just don't think that's real music. I'm not listening to a 15-second clip to feel music the way that I want to feel music."
For McRae, how a song makes her feel is the most important factor. She says if what she's writing doesn't feel like a full song, then it's worthless.
"It will always come from if it affects my heart before I think about other people perceiving it."
WATCH | Tate McRae's interview with Tom Power:
The full interview with Tate McRae is available on our podcast, Q with Tom Power. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
Interview with Tate McRae produced by Mitch Pollock.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
