As she gears up for her Miss Possessive tour, which includes stops in both Copenhagen and Stockholm, we chat with pop star Tate McRae about her love of the Swedish capital and her banging new album, So Close to What
Tate McRae has a thing for Stockholm. “I’ve been there before for a two-week stint and I just remember feeling like Stockholm felt like a fairytale a bit,” says McRae, who was in town to work with legendary producers Ilya and Savan Kotecha (both Max Martin collaborators). “Just so beautiful that I was like, this place can’t be real. And the people are also so beautiful, too. I remember I was like, ‘I could definitely live here’.” Luckily she’ll soon be coming back; having just released her absolutely banging third album, So Close to What (it instantly shot to number one on the Billboard album chart), the Canadian pop star is about to embark on her ambitious ‘Miss Possessive’ world tour, which will bring her to both Copenhagen and Stockholm at the top of the summer.
Despite the tour’s name, McRae, who is together with Australian rapper The Kid LAROI, is “actually not that possessive”. Her onstage alter ego, famously named Tatiana, however, most certainly is. “If my alter ego were to act around a boyfriend, she would be very possessive. I’m actually very trusting in my partners,” says McRae, who just so happens to be wearing a Double RL cap plucked from her boyfriend’s closet. “My true me in my relationship doesn’t get too possessive – we just kind of do our own things.”
It’s a good mentality for a pop star to have; McRae’s upcoming tour boasts 83 dates across the globe (for the North and South America leg of the tour, she’ll be supported by Swedish superstar Zara Larsson). But 21-year-old McRae, who has been performing most of her life (first as a dancer before getting into music), managing long distance is no big deal. “I’ve always done long distance in my relationships, so I think I’ve just gotten used to it,” she says. “You just gotta be super present when you’re back together.”
Building the visual and conceptual world around the tour, which mirrors the early aughts, flashy pop aesthetic of So Close to What, was “really fun”. “I definitely wanted it to feel way more feminine,” says McRae of the visual identity of the album. “I wanted it to feel a little classier, a little older and a little dramatic.” Take, for instance, the video for Sports car, which found McRae in an archival leopard corset by Roberto Cavalli and a second-skin, teeny tiny leather look by Balmain.
The moodboard, meanwhile, was filled with images of Gisele Bündchen, one of McRae’s “favourite supermodels”. “I’m the biggest Giselle fan, I love referencing her,” she says. One image in particular, which finds Bündchen strutting past a hoard of photographers, inspired the inclusion of paparazzi in McRae’s music videos and stage performances (most notably the paparazzi-heavy performance of ‘Sports car’ on Saturday Night Live). It’s a cheeky take on the hyper-observed life of a pop star (it should be noted both Lady Gaga and Britney Spears have included paparazzi in their lyrics and visuals). But McRae, despite being one of the biggest pop stars, doesn’t feel especially famous. “I don’t really feel fame, because when I step on stage it’s like I’m stepping into a different body,” she says. “It doesn’t necessarily feel like fame, it feels like a performance mode.”
In keeping with her low-key off-stage vibe, McRae doesn’t even check her streaming numbers (‘Sports car’ currently has over 116 million streams on Spotify). “My Spotify for artists is broken on my phone, so I can’t check it,” she admits. “When my parents came into town, I was like, ‘Can you show me my Spotify for artists? I want to see’.” (Her parents were in LA, where McRae has lived since she was 17, when the album dropped. McRae and her folks celebrated with a glass of wine following the whirlwind of press). McRae’s parents are logged into all of her accounts, including Instagram. “They see everything,” she says. “It’s scary.” Still, she swears they don’t read her DMs.
So how does McRae maintain this sense of normalcy whilst travelling the world and performing to arenas filled with fans? “It’s talking to your family a lot, talking to your friends a lot, journaling, meditating,” says McRae, noting that she’s been journaling since she was eight. “If I have my alone time and I can centre myself and feel energetically clear, then I feel like I’m usually good.” There are no outlandish green room requests – backstage she snacks on hard boiled eggs, pineapple and popcorn. “Never enough to make a meal, but also, like, bad snacks,” she says. “I need to upgrade it this year.” Also on her rider: socks and phone chargers.
On her last visit to Stockholm, McRae didn’t indulge in many Swedish delicacies. “I couldn’t really tell what Sweden was known for,” she says. Meatballs, I tell her. “Oh, really? I didn’t have any meatballs in Sweden. All I had was Swedish candy.”