Music

The new album from Morgan Wallen, the superstar who has outsold Taylor Swift, is a lengthy ode to shirking culpability that makes for near-perfect pop. By Shaad D’Souza.

Morgan Wallen’s weirdly appealing I’m the Problem

Taylor Swift will probably release an album this year. If she does, it probably won’t be the biggest record of the year – in America, at least. That’s because country superstar Morgan Wallen last week released his fourth album, I’m the Problem. His previous record, One Thing at a Time in 2023, spent more than 100 weeks in the top 10 of the Billboard 200 album chart and outsold Swift’s Midnights by nearly two million units. Although he hardly has the public profile of Swift and undeniably lacks her cross-generational, cross-genre appeal, Wallen is one of the few artists in the world who can claim to be operating in the same league.

Yet he only has name-brand familiarity in certain parts of the world. He is a god in some cities and in others is only known for his slowly growing list of public controversies. He has been booked multiple times for drunk and disorderly behaviour and in 2021 was filmed screaming racial slurs outside his home after what he later described as a “72-hour bender”. Just last year he was arrested after throwing a chair off the roof of a bar in Nashville, which nearly landed on two police officers below.

This year he was embroiled in what is arguably his funniest scandal while promoting I’m the Problem. He performed on Saturday Night Live for the second time and at the show’s end, as credits rolled, walked offstage unceremoniously without saying goodbye to the cast members onstage. He later posted an Instagram story of a private jet emblazoned with the caption “Get me to God’s country”.The move was seen as both disrespectful of the cast and crew of Saturday Night Live and somewhat ironic: how often has anyone been taken to God’s country in a private jet?

That last controversy kind of sums up both the world view and the appeal of Wallen’s music. He is a sanctified scumbag, a mulletted, ripped-jeans-wearing overgrown frat boy who also seems to view every misdemeanour, every failed one-night stand, every episode of hungover depression, as another stop on his road to martyrdom. If you know Wallen’s music, I’m the Problem’s title might scan as a sly joke: when is this guy ever taking responsibility for what he’s done? With certain exceptions – such as the song “Superman”, written to his young son, about his demons – I’m the Problem is an album-length ode to shirking culpability. Women? They don’t understand. Haters? They’re just looking for a reason to take you down. Whiskey? Well, as Wallen affirms on the surreal revisionist Bible tale “Genesis”, God invented firewater too.

Perhaps this truncated bio makes Wallen sound repugnant or unpleasant to be around, but I’m the Problem confirms what millions already know. It can, in a bizarre way, be a lot of fun to spend time with a character like this, who barrels through life with an acidic cocktail of self-absorption and self-loathing always in hand. For all this album’s smooth textures and sad-sack whining, Wallen is a profoundly compelling protagonist: his oeuvre is one long, long picaresque creation, set in a version of the American south that’s depressive, hypersexual and somehow motivated equally by immovable morals and a never-ending desire to party.

It’s a fascinating, incredibly loaded combination of topics that have always fascinated mainstream country fans, and one that’s rarely found a vessel as appealingly conflicted and anarchically uncontrollable as Wallen himself. Wallen is not a jingoistic party boy, like so many country stars before him, nor is he a Bible-bashing family man. While much mainstream country trades in archetypes and tall tales, Wallen’s music is distinctly first person, and people are complicated. That, at least, is a point of view: to listen to one of Wallen’s albums is to plunge yourself headfirst into a unique and sometimes toxic subjectivity, which is increasingly rare from anyone in mainstream pop not named The Weeknd or Post Malone – the latter of whom recently collaborated with Wallen on the fantastic, Tom Petty-aping
“I Had Some Help”.

With that said, I’m the Problem, like all of Wallen’s records, can be a tough sell if you haven’t already bought into his universe. Although I’m the Problem does expand the purview of his sound a little – bringing an ’80s yacht-rock groove into the otherwise tried and true palette of acoustic guitar and huge, stadium-sized drums – it is still emphatically a Wallen record, which means that it is long, 37 songs long, to be exact, clocking in at a few minutes shy of two hours. This is, amazingly, 20 minutes longer than his blockbuster 2021 record Dangerous: The Double Album and five minutes longer than One Thing at a Time. You have to assume that The Triple Album as a suffix is simply implied.

Are you supposed to listen to this in one hit? I don’t think so – songs such as “I’m the Problem” (track one) and “Jack and Jill” (track 26) have roughly the same message (in this case: when couples break up, both sides are at fault) and the snotty bitterness of “I’m the Problem” is dulled somewhat when, a while later, you hear the same story in a more morose light. Similarly, there are countless songs in the vein of “Superman” (message: I’m trying to be better) and “I’m a Little Crazy” (message: rough behaviour should be expected at a Time Like This) and so on. If anything, I’m the Problem probably accurately assumes there are really only a few topics that a pop song can or should cover and gives you each topic in a couple of flavours to keep you going through the two years until the next Wallen record comes out.

The few moments of ingenuity, if anything, are reminders that Wallen’s formula tends to be what he does best and that expanding his purview might dilute his appeal. “What I Want”, featuring the newly minted Canadian pop superstar Tate McRae, incorporates trap and, for the first time, a female vocal into Wallen’s world, and it just ends up sounding like the innumerable maudlin girl–boy heartbreak ballads that proliferated on pop radio in the mid 2010s.

“I Ain’t Comin Back”, Wallen’s second collaboration with Post Malone after “I Had Some Help”, has none of that song’s ebullient, soaring structure. Instead it combines the moodiness of ’80s noir with I’m the Problem’s yacht-rock fetish, resulting in a song that is smooth and sour in equal measure and nowhere near as ingratiating as its predecessor.

Slightly more successful is “Miami”, which uses a strangely processed vocal sample to create one of Wallen’s most weightless, pretty songs yet. It is his version of a club anthem but it’s still cool and disconnected, the one-night stand that Wallen sings about still not transcendent enough to hide the fact he’s strayed too far from home: “It ain’t nothin’ like where I’m from, nah / Yeah, I can’t keep my gun in my truck in Miami / They don’t know my name at these bars / And you can’t even see any stars in Miami.” It arrives at the end of the album like a little joke: get him back to God’s country, amiright?

While there is a distinctly politicised valency to what Wallen writes about, his music doesn’t feel particularly political – which, I would assume, is the point. Wallen has had his fair share of scraps that enrage American liberals and thrill right-wingers – sales for Dangerous: The Double Album soared after the videos came out of him yelling racial slurs, a stomach-churning concept. Despite this, he doesn’t seem particularly interested in becoming a poster child for jingoism or anti-woke culture, as other country superstars such as Toby Keith or Jason Aldean became at various points in their careers.

I’m the Problem has its own world view, its own sense of humanity. It’s a narcissistic, sometimes misogynistic one, of course, and were Wallen to explain it, I assume the words “me” and “I” would cop outsized use. It is entirely uninterested in connecting Wallen’s distaste for big-city culture and contemporary politics with any kind of movement or ideology. In that sense, it is the perfect pop music for today: the work of a man who spends two hours every couple of years trying to avow, staunchly, that he actually is an island. Ironically, millions seem to agree.

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on May 24, 2025 as "Scumbag millionaire".

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