Tate McRae is on the cover of the TIME100 Next issue, and as part of the package she’s shared her memories of her most popular viral videos — including the one that her parents absolutely hated, but led to her getting a record deal.
The video in question is Create With Tate: One Day, her first-ever YouTube video, which she posted in 2017 when she was 13. It shows Tate sitting at a keyboard, singing an original song called “one day.” “Oh my God,” cringes Tate while watching it.
She laughs, “My parents were sitting maybe like 5 feet away from me, on the couch. I wrote this [song] in, like, 20 minutes. And my parents were like, ‘This is god-awful. Please don’t put this on the internet.’ And I did.”
“To them, it was like, ‘What is this?'” she adds. “I was playing my dinky little piano, it was a love story … it was a very 13-year-old melodramatic thing that was happening.”
But, she notes, “It went, like, kinda viral and it blew up, and that’s how I got signed, was off that first video that I ever posted. When I started this YouTube channel and saw how it did so fast, that was one of the first times I ever felt like I had control over something.”
“All I had to do was sit down Thursday night, write a song and post it on Friday,” she adds. “And it turned into this little challenge for me, of being like, ‘If I could do this every week and see what happens, this could be really exciting.’ And it was.”
Tate also reminisces about her 2023 Billboard Music Awards performance of “Greedy,” and her videos for “Revolving Door” and “You Broke Me First.”
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