It’s hard to say exactly what “country” means these days, but even if you can’t define it, you know it when you hear it. “Last Night” by Morgan Wallen—the biggest song of 2023, and the defining country crossover hit of the 2020s—is country to the extent that Wallen sings in a macho Tennessee accent, though its wispy fingersnap beat almost sounds like ringtone rap. Earlier singles like “7 Summers” and “More Than My Hometown”—both from the 2021 blockbuster Dangerous: The Double Album—are no doubt country in their small-town love stories featuring fishing, beer, and God. But they remind me of the radio songs being piped into the pool where I worked in the early 2000s: a pleasant, vaguely poignant blur of pop and rock and country, the kind of thing that sounds today like simpler times.
Growing up in eastern Tennessee, the now 32-year-old Wallen was more of a Nickelback guy. “But once I started writing songs, it just sounded country,” he told Kelefa Sanneh in a 2020 New Yorker profile. “And I was like, well, I guess I’ll sing country music, because this is the life I know.” Five years later, Wallen is by far the biggest name in country at a time when the genre’s more popular than it’s been in decades; his last two records, Dangerous and 2023’s One Thing at a Time, are the only albums in history to spend at least 100 weeks in the top 10 of the Billboard 200. How does the man who recently fled New York City with the parting message, “Get me to God’s country,” feel about all this? If the 37 songs of I’m the Problem are any indication—well, not great! Instead, success and its accompanying scrutiny seem to have turned Wallen inward, resulting in his most paranoid album, and maybe his truest.
Historically, the sound of a Morgan Wallen single—and by extension, the sound of the country charts—is smoother than the souped-up bro-country of the 2010s: all earworm hooks and aerodynamic verses that tumble into one another so that the momentum never fades. It’s clever the way “Last Night” opens right into the chorus, or the myriad entendres of 2018’s “Whiskey Glasses,” one of his many boozy breakup anthems. (“Poor me,” he head-fakes on the intro, then shifts course: “Pour me another drink.”) Nearly all of Wallen’s hits involve a doomed romance, which he is either actively demolishing or drinking to forget. You might describe the kind of love that Wallen sings about as toxic, though within all the drama is a passion that recalls the desperate lotharios of ’90s R&B, as if he’s throwing rocks up at your window in the rain.
By comparison, the singles from I’m the Problem feel brittle, subdued, and sour. The lonesome guitar of the title track sounds pretty, but the story Wallen tells takes the “I know you are, but what am I?” conceit of last year’s Post Malone collab “I Had Some Help” to even saltier terrain. “I guess I’m the problem/And you’re Miss Never-Do-No-Wrong,” he sings wryly, revealing the title to be another of his smart aleck-y puns that feints at accountability like his last title track. (What first appeared to be a cliché about progress was a message to an ex who’d demanded he get sober: “I hate to tell you, girl, but I’m only quitting one thing at a time.”) On the other hand, there’s “Lies Lies Lies” and “Just in Case”: a whitewashed reboot of the concept of Willie Nelson’s “I Never Cared for You,” and a mid-tempo breakup ballad that borrows “Last Night”’s looping rhythms, minus the pop appeal. Together, they present an image of a man in a downward spiral, quieting his inner monologue by drinking himself to sleep. The courtroom sketch cover portrait does not seem incidental.
Listen to enough Wallen songs and you’ll start to tell the difference between the ones on which he’s listed among the writing credits and the ones handled by his trusted stable of co-writers (Charlie Handsome, Michael Hardy, Ernest Keith Smith, Ashley Gorley, Blake Pendergrass, and so on). The latter tend to cram their narratives chock-full with rustic detail: The drowsy “Revelation” aims for poetry, but feels like overload in its wordy depiction of a drunk motel sunrise. Wallen has a writing credit on its companion, “Genesis,” a bit of Dire Straits-esque heartland rock that meets the same themes of addiction and temptation head-on: “Swear it’s there in my blood/I was born to be lost,” he yowls, beating the original sin allegory to death, but winningly. Through this song, and the more compelling of the three dozen others, runs a streak of fatalism that defies the self-improvement gospel of our time and the moral imperatives of pop’s empowerment era. He is not listening and learning, setting boundaries, doing self-care; instead, he concludes, I am what I am. “When am I gonna learn?” he asks himself on “Genesis,” then shrugs: “I guess I prolly won’t.”
If there’s a through-line between Wallen and the second-biggest country singer in America, Zach Bryan, it’s the way alcoholism has always lingered at the margins—not the carefree drinking of Shaboozey’s “A Bar Song (Tipsy),” but something darker and more destined. Now Wallen’s crashing out in plain sight, crying to his ex that he’s made a huge mistake after another drunken, sleepless night on “Falling Apart.” He’s a co-writer on that one, as he is on “Kick Myself,” a cheesy rap-rock moment, though not without its pathos. He’s cleaned his act up, quit his vices, consulted medical and spiritual professionals, but remains miserable. “Kicked the shit that I used to use/But I just can’t kick myself,” he raps despondently, observing that since sobriety, life’s only gotten worse.
Delete two-thirds of I’m the Problem, whose back-end filler tracks are not even worth noting (save for the bizarre “Miami,” which sounds like a The-Dream song for the Don’t Tread on Me set), and a more interesting album emerges. Past the lonely nights at the bottom of a bottle and ping-pong matches of spite and yearning for women who’ve blocked his number are a few songs that approach the subject of American decline obliquely. “This world’s been changin’/But the folks round here, they ain’t been,” Wallen drawls on “Don’t We,” an ode to partying in parking lots and standing for the flag. “Not everybody likes this kinda life/But we do, don’t we?” he nudges on the chorus, a message to a select few of his tens of millions of listeners.
But the most telling track is the last one, “I’m a Little Crazy,” which Wallen performed for the first time at his Sand in My Boots festival with a brief introduction: “This next song right here is the classiest way I could figure out to talk a little shit.” What begins as a gentle folk ballad tracing his rough and rowdy ways to his moonshine-running grandpa shifts on the second verse, where he sings of sleeping with a loaded .44 in a voice as rich as it’s ever sounded. “Hope I never have to use it, but you never know these days,” he goes on, then brings the title to its knowing conclusion: “I’m a little crazy, but the world’s insane.” The last verse paints a picture of a drunken shut-in yelling at the TV: “I do it every night, but the news don’t change,” he sings. What the scene suggests about its singer isn’t flattering, but in its paranoid presumptions, it captures something real about this moment in America, where a former landscaper has found himself a star.
