ExclusiveTate McRae ‘Poured Everything’ Into Debut Album ‘I Used to Think I Could Fly’: Lyric Breakdown

‘Don’t Come Back’

“I wrote this song like right as the album was wrapping up. So, I had all my songs. This was a last-minute edition,” she explained to J-14, noting that they used a sample of a song called “Ride With Me.” Tate added, “It was really cool because [there was] this crazy cool guitar loop that I was obsessed with. I started just free-styling, this sample over the top of it. Honestly, I wanted to come into the album with a very bad bitch energy talking about — I feel like I have a very hard exterior when it comes to like relationships. If you wanna leave, leave. Then, it’s really crazy because you go down the album and it kinda trickles apart and [reveals] how sensitive I am, which I think is really cool.”

‘I’m So Gone’

“I had gone through so many different phases of relationships over the summer, and like I said before, it ended up being just like this [evolution] of me as a person. When you first meet me up front, I will put out to the world that I couldn’t care less. But then again, I feel like I’m also the most observant person ever. I’m sensitive as hell. I really do put that into my music,” Tate gushed over this track. “It’s crazy because I feel like there is this roller coaster of calling people out on their s–t and being like, ‘No, I’m a boss.’ I’m all this stuff.”

‘What Would U Do’

Release ahead of the album, Tate told J-14 this was her angry state of the album, noting that she was “furious.” However, she noted that the song wasn’t written about a former fling.

“It was a different situation. For the first time ever, I hadn’t written about — I was always talking about how I had just written ‘Feel Like S–t’ and ‘Chaotic’ and all these really personal, sad songs,” she explained, noting that with this track she needed to “get some anger out here, and I’m pissed.” Writing this with a few notable names, including Charlie Puth, was “fun” for Tate to write.

‘Chaotic’

“I was terrified to release ‘Chaotic,'” Tate admitted. “I feel like my songs are really personal, but this was the first song where I was like, ‘Whoa, I’m talking about some of my biggest fears here,’ which is something that I would only talk about with my parents. … It was crazy because I talked about my friends from back home, I talked about my biggest fear moving to L.A. and some really personal stuff that I would never even talk about with my friends. That was scary.”

‘Hate Myself’

“I think one of the easiest things to do in relationships is blame other people,” the singer said about this song, revealing that she’ll “always take the blame.” This song was inspired by a breakup where Tate said she had “a gross feeling of guilt at the time” and felt like “I just messed everything up.”

She added, “I think that’s something that songwriters don’t talk about a lot because it’s always like you make yourself the victim and you make the other person, the devil or the antagonist in the story. I think in this situation, I was like, you know what, I’m just going to go in head first and take this really bold move and name off all my flaws, which is really, really scary.”

Listeners will notice Tate’s voice “cracking” in the track because she was “sobbing” while recording the song, which she noted is “kind of special.”

‘She’s All I Wanna Be’

Tate revealed that she was “really, really nervous” to release this song because it came from a “very vulnerable place.”

“I wrote this song fully by myself, which is really scary because it was, first off, I’ve never released like a punky song before. Second, no one gave me their opinion. It was very much me asking my mom and dad, ‘Do you guys think this is a good song?’ I don’t show a million people my music,” she explained. “I was really nervous because I genuinely had no input on this song. I also didn’t know how people were gonna perceive me literally saying in a song, I don’t wanna be myself. I wanna be someone else. Which is not normal to say. I was really happy with the response because I was so scared going into it.”

‘Boy X’

“The whole story reveals — it talks about this really tough, shielded girl who basically would walk out into the world and never wanted to experience anyone because she didn’t wanna get her heart broken,” she said of this song. “Then, this boy comes into her life.”

The part fictional and part non-fictional track goes on to discuss “how this guy gets a wandering eye after she’s fallen in love with him.” Tate added, “It was really cool because at the end of the song — this song originally used to be six minutes long and it talks about how at the very end, it like reveals that this whole song’s just written about me and how I don’t fall in love very often.”

She went on to say that the song is really “heartbreaking” and “personal because it was written about strictly me as a girl.”

‘You’re So Cool’

Tate revealed that she honestly has “no idea” if the “cool” person who inspired this track “would pay attention” to the song. She explained, “I honestly have no idea. I think that’s … I just genuinely don’t know if they care at all about anything.”

‘Feel Like S–t’

When discussing this song, Tate really spoke about the album as a whole.

“This whole album is written about everyone,” she said. “I feel like you can feel it in my voice and in the stories. You can tell that they’re real people I was writing about. I feel like what I’m most proud of is from the evolution of my last EP to now … it’s real, it’s real s–t that I went through.”

‘Go Away’

The album’s title comes from this song, which Tate explained came from the heart.

“I don’t know why, I kept repeating, ‘I used to think I could fly, now I’m just holding on.’ And I thought that was really heartbreaking because this is the only sentence that could sum up the album,” she explained. “It very much talks about the dynamic of being younger and being fearless and thinking that anything is possible and then, growing up and all of that going away. I needed to write a song about that and how relationships influence that so greatly.”

‘I Still Say Goodnight’

“In this song, I get such specific visuals in my head of what I was picturing of this person when I was writing it,” Tate recalled. “It was really interesting because there’s this one line: ‘I know that look you get when you’re about to lie.’ I think that’s such a crazy thing to say, because I know that people have a face. You can always tell when an energy shifts, when someone’s like in the middle of telling you a lie.”

Written with Finneas O’Connell, this song was “really beautiful how we were piecing together this whole, really crazy scenario.”