A Look at Tate McRae
Diving deeper into claims from the Switched on Pop podcast
Something Different
I came across an interesting video on social media this week that made a few claims about Tate McRae and her songs that I thought I might be able to test using my database and custom ChatGPT. If you’re new, you can find details about me and this data project here. This article isn’t being written in partnership with the podcast Switched on Pop which is the source of the video. The hosts in this clip were Reanna Cruz and Charlie Harding.
The Observations
Let me say up front that I understand there is some subjectivity involved in the claims made by these hosts. And the data in my system sometimes addresses them directly and sometimes indirectly.1 And lastly, this is done in good natured curosity with zero attempt to cast any shade on this podcast or its hosts!
There are 3 claims presented in this video.
Tate McRae’s voice lacks identity or a distinguishable personality.
Her songs have no chorus or the choruses are weak or misplaced.
Her songs lack orginality in that she is often “vibe snatching” or interpolating hits from previous artists.
The First Claim
To address this I had to consider how to get at the idea of identity or distinguishable personality in Tate McRae’s vocal delivery. While I don’t gather data on “vocal timbre” per se, I do gather data on the vocal inflection or accent a performer uses in a song; which can contribute significantly to the overal “identity or personality” of an artist’s voice. And my custom ChatGPT found something interesting about Tate McRae: she blends her use of the generic Western Pop vocal inflection with other vocal inflections at a much higher rate than other female pop artists.
More specifically, she often blends it with the Urban vocal inflection, creating a delivery that is actually more unique than her white, female, pop contemporaries like Sabrina Carpenter, who tend to adhere more strickly to the Western Pop inflections exclusively.
The Second Claim
Here is a much easier question to answer according to the data. Below we can see that Tate McRae songs actually have slightly more chorus usage per song compared to other female pop artists and even more compared to the more general pool of all pop songs in the Hot 100 between 2021 and 2024.
Being that chorus strength is significantly more subjective and not something I’ve tried to quantify in my data gathering, I must leave that portion of the claim untouched. But for what it’s worth, I do think the chorus in “2 Hands” is great.
The Third Claim
The final claim of “vibe snatching” or interpolation is another slippery one that does involve a significant degree of subjectivity. Sometimes it is glaringly obvious. Perhaps the most famous example being the lawsuit brought by Marvin Gaye’s family against Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams over the song “Blurred Lines” being strikingly similar to “Got To Give It Up”.
But there are also edge cases where some ears might hear the similarity and some might not. Or it might be just one section of a song that is clearly borrowing from another while the rest of the song does not. However, this a very real and relevant phenomanon in popular music and it is something I do try to capture in my data base. I call it “Historic Copy”.
While it happens rarely and we are dealing with very different sample sizes, the data does show that Tate McRae uses this technique in her material more often as a percentage of her releases than the average of her female pop contemporaries in the Hot 100.
But for some perspective, Tate McRae’s rate of usage is only slightly higher than Sabrina Carpenter’s. And in the case of the former it’s only 2 songs and in the case of the later it’s a mere 1 song, among all their songs in the Hot100:
The Final Thoughts
As usual, I could have gone deeper into each of these questions but the length of these articles is always a concern.
I was pleasantly surprised to find that I was able to address most of the claims with fairly relevant data. My thanks to the Switched on Pop folks for their insights and inspiration to explore. Perhaps I’ll dig through more of these podcasts for other claims to check out!
Hopefully you enjoyed this little dive into Tate McRae. Please subscribe for more insights to come and to help me continue this project!
Also keep in mind that the pool of songs I’m looking at are songs that appear in the Hot 100 charts, which captures most of the songs relevant to pop music but doesn’t always represent the entirety of the released material by an artist, which may comprise some of what these hosts are referencing.