Most Meaningful Songs, Women in Music, Dream Collaborators

Before there was Tate McRae, ultra-polished pop performer, there was Tate McRae, preteen from Calgary, Alberta, writing songs at dwelling and importing them to YouTube.

And whereas McRae’s high-caliber, intricately choreographed performances and visually putting, maximalist music movies have arguably turn into the focal factors of her public picture at present (manifesting in a fierce alter ego she calls Tatiana), it’s her different aspect that Billboard is honoring as this 12 months’s Women in Music Hitmaker — the one who used to take solace in crafting lyrics to sing not in entrance of greater than 10,000 screaming followers however alone in her bed room. The 22-year-old’s underappreciated pen is simply as deadly as her efficiency capabilities. After a modest debut in the acquainted lane of Gen Z pop melancholia — making her first Billboard Hot 100 look in 2020 with “You Broke Me First” — McRae enlisted fellow hit-makers Ryan Tedder and Amy Allen to assist craft pristine, radio-­pleasant pop bangers that she may really transfer to, tapping into her upbringing as a aggressive dancer onstage and channeling previous pop icons corresponding to Britney Spears (to whom she’s now ­steadily in contrast).

“Tate was dedicated and disciplined to become the absolute best,” remembers famend choreographer Sean Bankhead (Lil Nas X, Victoria Monét, Normani), whom McRae tapped particularly to assist together with her transformation, of first assembly her. “I have always wanted to mold the next big pop girlie who could not just write amazing songs and sing them live but of course command every stage she stepped foot on. And with Tate we accomplished that in a very quick two years.”

Watch Billboard’s Women in Music 2026 stay on YouTube.com/Billboard and Billboard.com on April 29, starting at 9:30 p.m. ET/6:30 p.m. PT. For extra protection on Women in Music, click on here.

With her 2023 breakthrough, Think Later, and its 2025 follow-up, the Billboard 200-topping So Close to What, McRae turned a chart common, as songs like “Greedy,” “It’s Ok I’m Ok” and her post-The Kid LAROI breakup anthem “Tit for Tat” all landed in the highest 20 of the Hot 100. Last May, her Morgan Wallen collaboration “What I Want” turned her first Hot 100 No. 1, and regardless of swerving from her now-signature pop sound, the team-up didn’t really feel “out of the ordinary” for McRae. “I used to write to only guitar in the studio, so it felt natural,” she tells Billboard matter-of-factly.

Now, on a drizzly Friday afternoon in February, she’s someplace in between the 2 aforementioned Tates — nonetheless in full glam from the photograph shoot she simply wrapped as stylists flutter round her but additionally chatting freely about her burgeoning love for Jersey City (close to the place rumored boyfriend Jack Hughes of the NHL’s New Jersey Devils and the Olympic gold medal-­profitable U.S. hockey staff is predicated) and whether or not there’s nonetheless time to get pleasure from her favourite climate right here in New York, the place she now lives. “Is it still raining?” she asks hopefully, craning her neck to see. “I love the rain!”

With fame has come noisier on-line hypothesis about her politics and private life — and she or he’s spoken in the previous about her difficult emotions, post-proverbial “rebrand,” across the public’s means of sexualizing younger feminine pop stars. But she says she’s combated this by ditching social media and “romanticizing” her actual life as an alternative. And together with her $110.8 million-grossing (in line with Billboard Boxscore) Miss Possessive area tour in the books since November, she confirms she’s again in the studio, feeling impressed by all the pieces from her current travels to Paris to her newfound obsession with Scottish dream-pop legends Cocteau Twins. (She’ll return to the street this summer season, with headlining turns at Montreal’s Osheaga and Chicago’s Lollapalooza.)

She has no thought the place her writing will take her subsequent — however that’s completely OK together with her. “I’m just constantly trying to make art that feels somewhat timeless and [give] performances that feel like they can eventually stand up beside my favorite performances,” McRae says with a shrug.

“It definitely feels like the beginning,” she provides. “I feel like right now I’m looking at a blank page being like, ‘Where do I take this?’ ”

How would you outline successful music?

You must assume with probably the most excessive and open thoughts if you’re writing … [otherwise] it’s probably the most uninspiring work. Everything’s been accomplished earlier than — each key has been performed, each phrase has been used. All you will have is your personal distinctive perspective.

Which of your hits have been probably the most significant?

“Sports Car” is one in every of my favourite songs of mine. It was such a swing and such a enjoyable music to jot down.

“Greedy” was a really significant music to me. When I believe again to that part of my life, I used to be so misplaced. I used to be 19, and this large singing profession felt so formidable to me, and it felt like this was one of many first occasions the place I had pure readability and path on the place I wished to go visually and sonically.

Who’s your dream collaborator?

Lana Del Rey. I hearken to Lana 24/7 — I’m simply the most important fan.

Which different ladies in the trade do you admire?

I like Olivia Dean, Sabrina [Carpenter], Gracie [Abrams]. Olivia [Rodrigo] — I’m so excited for her to drop music once more. She’s an unbelievable songwriter. She by no means fears brutal honesty or laying out all her insecurities or emotions on the desk. She’s like that as a buddy too, simply probably the most open, sincere individual.

I all the time look to Rihanna and assume she’s obtained the very best profession ever. She’s simply the best lady alive.

People love to speak about your “rebrand,” however what steps did you’re taking to turn into the performer you’re at present?

I had a really particular imaginative and prescient. I keep in mind being like, “I want to be a pop star. I want Sean Bankhead. I want to write over this tempo. I want to do it in a hockey rink. I want this to be the aesthetic.” I may see all of it in my mind.

It was about accumulating the correct folks round me to make it a actuality. Sometimes you get indicators and messages on the place you’re presupposed to go in life, and also you ignore it. And then lastly, it turns into probably the most piercing feeling in your intestine, and also you get up and also you’re like, “All right. No more time to waste.”

Are there methods in which you’ve felt misunderstood by the general public?

So many alternative methods. As a girl, you simply have to know that you just’re consistently going to be underneath a microscope, and typically that’s a extremely scary and overwhelming feeling. But on the optimistic aspect of that, with scrutiny and opinions and folks’s perceptions of you, it simply results in numerous progress and doubling down on who you’re.

I may say that individuals’s feedback don’t have an effect on me, however after all they do. I’m a lady. I’ve feelings and emotions and insecurities. It sucks to have folks commenting in your physique or commenting on who you’re or having perceptions which might be fully off.

But for me, I’m simply right here to make artwork. Trying to elucidate your self is a sport that I can by no means win.

This story seems in the April 18, 2026, concern of Billboard.