If you're not familiar with the name Tate McRae, there's a pretty good chance your kids know her hit song "You Broke Me First" from TikTok. Tate joined Valentine in the Morning to talk all about her music, TikTok, dancing, and so much more. She went viral on TikTok at the beginning of the pandemic and since she's been in quarantine, she doesn't feel like much in her life has changed.
"It's super weird! I feel like not a lot has changed when so much has changed. It's an interesting thing to grasp...i'm busier, I just have more to do and I didn't think I was going to because I just graduated school early. I thought I was going to have so much free time and I don't. I'm just working, but it's great. I wish I could say it's weird because I get to go to events and stuff, but I can't go anywhere."
She may only be 17, but she has already made it on Billboard’s 21 under 21 Ones to Watch list, Rolling Stones’ list of top ten biggest breakthrough artists, and she is the youngest musician to be on Forbes’ 30 under 30 list. TikTok became pretty instrumental in quarantine of really pushing her music career, but she never paid attention to any of the stats so she didn't realize her song was going viral.
"TikTok was interesting because my song was normal, just doing well and then TikTok made the song blow up and it went crazy. It was really cool. I didn't really look at the stats until I got a tweet and it was like Headline Planet, you're bubbling under the top 100 on Billboard. I was like what?! I didn't even know my song was close to being at that level. It was like your number 1 next to being in the top 100. I think that's when I started to look at numbers just freaking out because I didn't even notice all of the TikToks people made to my song, but when it made the Hot 100 it was crazy.
If you don't recognize Tate McRae from her music, you might remember her from her dancing. She place third on season 13 of So You Think You Can Dance when she was only 12. She always thought she would just make a career out of dancing and become a professional dancer. She never thought that she would be making music her career.
"I went to ballet school for a long time and it wasn't related to music at all, it was just dancing while I did music on the side. I always was like I want to be a superstar and my parents were just like what does that mean so they put me in dance classes and I got really serious about it. Eventually I thought I was just going to be a professional dancer because I had no idea how to get into the music industry. I never thought that making a YouTube channel would actually result into something."
Don't forget to stream 'You Broke Me First' and keep in touch with MYfm on Instagram/Twitter/Facebook!