You could say that Morgan Wallen has achieved his 2020s pop domination by brute force. His last two albums — 2021’s Dangerous: The Double Album and 2023’s One Thing at a Time — clock in at 30 and 36 tracks respectively, which thanks to streaming-era math is a boon to one’s chart fortunes. Just look at the current albums chart: Both releases are still in the Billboard 200’s top ten as of this writing, with Thing at Number 4 and Dangerous at Number 9, and they’ve each clocked in more than 100 weeks in the album chart’s highest echelon. But other artists have released data dumps without being rewarded by long-term listening and tours that consist of multi-night stadium stints. What is it about Wallen — a former baseball player and The Voice castoff from small-town Tennessee with a battery-acid-dipped drawl and a lot of search results that also include the word “controversy” — that makes him such a draw?
I’m the Problem, Wallen’s fourth album, has a title that could double as a cheeky answer to that question. The song named after it, which leads off the track listing, is a stormy chronicle of a toxic relationship that seems too doomed to fail (“If I’m such a waste of breath/Such a waste of time/Then why you on your way to waste another Friday night?” Wallen grouses on the bridge). Placing it front and center reinforces the love-me-or-hate-me stance that Wallen has cultivated since his breakthrough in the late 2010s — an attitude that seems very attuned to a particular strain of the modern American mood, and one driven home by his albums’ heft.
This is why writing about Wallen’s on-record output can be a tricky thing. He has a bristly persona and history of not-great acts that can bleed into some listeners’ perceptions of him — and it isn’t helped by lines like “Baby I can't wait to see the look on your pretty face, when I break your heart in two,” which appears on the blithely spiteful poison-pen letter “Kiss Her in Front of You.” But his polished (if slightly dour) country-rock is, as a representation of the form, well-crafted and hooky while not being immune to the occasional stylistic left turn: The existentially troubled line-disco cut “Love Somebody” could fit in on a Dua Lipa record with a couple of tweaks (it actually interpolates the British DJ Digital Farm Animals’ 2018 EDM-pop cut “Tokyo Nights,” which Lipa also flipped on her punchy 2024 single “Training Season”), while the whiskey-and-regret-soaked “Genesis” has a weary gleam that recalls mid-period Fleetwood Mac, and the duet with moody Canadian upstart Tate McRae, “What I Want,” has trap snares fluttering around the chorus.
Not that his music is only ear-catching when it’s melding country with something else. “Jack and Jill,” which recounts the tale of two small-town kids whose big dreams get buried by a pile of empty bottles, is arrestingly told, with a gut-punch of a final line: “The preacher they used when they said ‘I do’/Is reading out of Psalm 23.” Wallen’s weary wail is well-suited to this particular tale of heartland heartbreak —wouldn’t you be at your wit’s end to see two more lives wasted like this? — and it helps the ballad, which is tucked into the album’s back half, stand out. Another track that comes near the end, the stomping country-rocker “Working Man’s Song,” also captures the zeitgeist: “I punch the clock, wanna punch a ticket to New York and punch the boss,” he grumbles over sturdy guitars, and even though he’s reached the echelon of stadium-headliner stardom where he’s probably a boss in some sense, the roiling anger feels real. (Another track with a more generalized antipathy toward city slickers, the HARDY-assisted “Come Back As a Redneck,” is less successful despite its music having enough bless-your-heart stevia to turn a swimming pool into sweet tea.)
A more generous reading of Wallen’s penchant for albums that blow past the 90-minute mark might be that he feels like he has too much going on to fit his life into a standard release’s track listing, and in order to fully express himself he (with the help of Nashville’s top-flight songwriters and longtime producer Joey Moi) needs to gather up his feelings, contradictions and all, into an omnibus not dissimilar to those end-of-season Instagram photo compilations — although he’s more likely to flaunt his rougher moments than your typical poster. “Superman,” a free-flowing note to his son, gets into his public scrapes (“One day you’re gonna see my mugshot/From a night when I got a little too drunk” is its opening line) and alcoholism (“Now and then that bottle’s my kryptonite/Brings a man of steel down to his knees") while admitting, “I hope I’m always your hero,” a sentiment that’s animated songs about the surprises that accompany parenthood since way before “Cat’s in the Cradle” was first committed to vinyl.
Perhaps that willingness to nod toward his fuck-ups and air out his ugly thoughts is why people keep returning to Wallen and his music. After all, his official merch store is selling a necklace that declares, in precisely rendered sterling silver, that its wearer is, just like Wallen, “The Problem” — a bit of branded aspirationalism that also nods to why Wallen is one of this moment’s biggest stars. Yes, his public behavior and the music’s country trappings — from the copious shout-outs to whiskey to the banjos and mandolins — might make him seem more amenable to one side of 2025’s ever-widening political divide. But the “love me or leave me” attitude that animates his glowering songs is as American as apple pie — or apple pie whiskey.
