The New Yorker:

The country singer presents himself like some guy you ran into at Home Depot. But he may be the most commercially successful musician of his era.

By Amanda Petrusich

Morgan Wallen is a country singer, almost defiantly so, though he is also popular on a scale that seems to circumvent genre entirely. Each of Wallen’s past two albums spent at least a hundred weeks hovering near the top of the Billboardchart, making him arguably the most commercially successful artist of his era—a sobering statistic for anybody who once dismissed him as a reality-show castoff with a showstopping mullet, warbling about Jack Daniel’s with the kind of fawning devotion Keats once applied to a Grecian urn. In a curious way, Wallen’s cultural power is still being underestimated. In 2022 and 2023, Wallen and Taylor Swift released new albums within five months of each other—him “One Thing at a Time,” her “Midnights.” He outsold her by a significant degree (5.3 million to 3.2 million, according to Forbes). This week, Wallen released his fourth album, “I’m the Problem,” which features thirty-seven songs and fifty songwriters. Odds are, sales will be stratospheric. His connection to his audience may be broad, but it is not anonymous. His point of view is precisely defined: God, Chevy, girls, booze.

Over the past several decades, Wallen’s particular lyrical fascinations have grown impossibly coded, becoming shorthand for an entire world view. But if you can neutralize the intimations, I don’t know—who doesn’t like a good party? Who doesn’t wanna go home with somebody who’s a “little bit angel, whole lotta outlaw,” as Wallen sings on “Cowgirls,” a pining single from “One Thing at a Time”? The vocals are muscular, staunch, and just gritty enough. Wallen has abandoned the panting rasp of his mid-twenties, and now performs with force and depth. On “Sand in My Boots,” he remembers a tryst on the beach, and the deep anguish of leaving someone he cared about behind. But what if he hadn’t? His voice is lush with regret:

Go to link