Morgan Wallen Has Hit a Wall of His Own Making

Since 2020, country firebrand Morgan Wallen has taken repeated spins through a cycle of assuring us that the partying he sings about isn’t ruining his life, that he’s tightening up. All the while his twangy, trap-infused pop-rock winks at an audience enthralled by the underlying vibe in the stories about him that make TMZ — like escaping the SNL end-of-show cast mingle to get back to “God’s country” — that the 32-year-old Tennessee singer-songwriter does not care for stuffy formalism and big-city ways. Wallen’s seemingly endless tap of bittersweet songs of regret endears him to millions, but the trouble informing them often undermines the universality of the project. “I’ve spent the last 11 months trying to figure out, ‘Do I still want to be the problem?’” he said in a press release ahead of his new album, fitfully titled I’m the Problem. Its cover art resembles his real-life courtroom sketch: Last year in April, Wallen was arrested after drunkenly tossing a chair off the roof of a downtown Nashville bar; portraits of the artist at his disorderly conduct sentencing yield the same worried middle-distance stare and cream-colored walls. For listeners primed to respect outlaw signifiers, his intermittent rule breaking is humanizing and authenticating. But others who prize decency and stewardship hope for a figurative (or literal) come-to-Jesus moment, while people of color wonder why they should trust him. The behavior that excites one subset susses another, and Wallen’s career has become one of minor adjustments and penance seeking as he continues to break chart records set by Garth Brooks in the ’90s. Grace is good for business.

Wallen’s fourth studio LP is the textbook performance of soul searching from a country-chart fixture who has just caught a case. Problem unpacks a tripartite dilemma: Wallen got dumped. He’s also grown tired of the predictability of his own hits. And now his rap sheet makes the self-destructive abandon in his songs feel too real and too close to dark sagas of alcohol abuse in country music for comfort. These conundrums thread throughout an album trying to create some distance between the singer and the swashbuckling mind-set of 2023’s One Thing at a Time, where 35 of 36 songs touched on drinking. But Wallen’s writing continues to trace similar plotlines. A breakup begets drinking, which begets faith-tinged remorse that Wallen angles to mold into maudlin nuggets of radio-format cross-pollination, reminding you he grew up on Lil Wayne and Nickelback. Conflicted, Wallen gestures at saying his worst is behind him while defending a right to remain a little wild. The songs trying to showcase maturation are equally apprehensive about leaving old formulas behind.

Problem’s intersecting inconsistencies bunch up in songs like “Miami,” a late-album yarn about randomly grabbing a flight to Florida, feeling out of place, and nearly falling in love. Wallen’s tune samples the 1985 Keith Whitley song “Miami, My Amy,” a yearning ballad about pining for a call from a woman he met on the southeast coast. In Problem’s “Miami,” Whitley chirps in the background of a story about not wanting to be tied down romantically and hating the city as a self-identifying redneck. The Drake-ish jam is bound to ruffle purist feathers for employing Whitley as a chipmunk chorus on an R&B-trap ode to milling around Miami bars looking for a hookup. “I already know I’m gonna get crucified for that song,” Wallen told Kelleigh Bannen on Apple Music’s Today’s Country Radio. But the real affront is his invocation of his predecessor’s name as a shorthand for the worst possible outcome for his own bad habits. “I’m crashing, I’m burning,” another song called “Revelation” opens. “I’m Whitley on the bourbon.” His last album’s “Keith Whitley” celebrated the music of the Kentucky star, who died at 34 from alcohol poisoning, and paired well with Wallen’s own drinking and pining. This new lionization of Whitley’s unraveling itches. Problem exudes a feeling that Wallen very much enjoys the behaviors he’s meant to be rebuffing. The darkest cuts are “Kick Myself” and “I Got Better,” stately Americana tracks about how strange it feels to change your ways; each relay palpable despair without the sated smirk coming across in the songs about acting out in bars.

Figuring out how to establish a sense of self that is less overtly tied to bar bravado, while also cataloguing the parts of yourself that you hope you don’t have to leave behind in maturity, is relatable. Wallen gets the idea across in the catchiest means possible, having assembled a group of notable rock, rap, pop, and country engineers. Joey Moi (who produced Nickelback’s “Photograph”) works with Charlie Handsome (from Post Malone’s “Go Flex” and Mac Miller’s “Weekend”) and southern country singer-songwriters ERNEST and HARDY to smudge boundaries between everyone’s respective fields, which Wallen approaches with the same Chad Kroeger–inspired yowl. It’s too restrained, too tasteful for the ruddy subject matter. The snare in Wallen’s trap approximations rarely smacks outside the Tate McRae team-up “What I Want,” which wants what Florida Georgia Line and Bebe Rexha’s “Meant to Be” had. Wallen told comic and podcaster Theo Von that he and his fans are “tired of hearing” trap drums now, but a spattering of Problem songs beg to differ. Problem isn’t bringing more ideas to the table, only angling to come on less drunk and with less hip-hop affect. Wallen is reaching the same crossroads his bro-country predecessors Florida Georgia Line faced a few albums in when, likely sick of complaints about dabbling in R&B, the duo made a folkier push. Rap is all too often the childish thing the modern country singer feels he must set aside when he is done sowing proverbial oats. Shucking the pretense of Blackness is received as homecoming. It feels disconcerting, transactional, and counter to a modern uptick of Black listeners and performers in country. Problem highlights the ideological inconsistencies of the small-town Tennessee singer-songwriter who despises a coastal metropolis but loves to dip in the cadences of rappers who live in them. Wallen can’t decide whether he prefers the tepid trap and pure country apostasy of the Whitley flip or the rustic reflection of “I Got Better,” just as he seems reluctant to fully commit to either a heartbreaker routine or a self-improvement regimen.

“Superman” begins as a touching meditation on how Wallen’s son will feel when he finds out about his father’s rough edges but seems more interested in communicating the value of sticking to your guns. Even there, Wallen delivers a mixed message, loading an act of owning his infamy and offering a window into his family life with “stand your ground” boilerplate. Indecision can make for a beautiful song about wishing you had better tendencies, like album closer “I’m a Little Crazy.” But the 37-song Problem has beaten every idea half to death by the time you get there. With 49 writers involved, gratingly simplistic catch-phrase-seeking couplets pack an almost two-hour ride with wan clichés about emptying bottles. These couplets are where Wallen sounds most convincingly over himself, though: “I know there’s some things that drinking doesn’t change / But I keep drinking til it does,” “Drinking Til It Does” announces. “Drinking in Reverse” dreams of the power to un-drink whiskey. Like Drake, Wallen is in a lucrative holding pattern where the news and songs about his worst behavior feed hope he can stay at an acceptable level of incorrigibility while continuing to meet the professional obligations of the A-list terrestrial-radio commodity. Everywhere in music, these incongruous expectations breed inscrutable and immutable stars.

Related

• Morgan Wallen Explains SNL Walk-Off: ‘I Was Just Ready to Go Home’
• Morgan Wallen Arrested on Felony Charges for Allegedly Tossing Chair From Roof