Morgan Wallen’s world domination continues apace. The country singer’s last two albums spent 29 weeks at the top of the US chart. This week his latest, fourth offering, I’m the Problem, had the biggest opening week of the year so far in the US as well as going straight in at No 1 in the UK.
This prodigious achievement may owe a little to a canny release strategy: streaming metrics mean that longer albums often chart higher, and I’m the Problem weighs in at a staggering 37 tracks. Equally, all 37 are in the US singles chart this week, setting a new record – Wallen is a commercial phenomenon, the biggest country star to cross over to mainstream success since Taylor Swift.
Like Swift, Wallen’s tours have graduated from arenas to stadiums, which makes this rare intimate album-launch show a spectacularly hot ticket. The preshow queue, in which Stetsons and cowboy boots figure large, stretches way down Chalk Farm Road in north London: “I hear 300,000 people tried to get tickets for tonight,” marvels Wallen.
Yet it is hard to see why there is quite that level of fuss. Not even Wallen’s fiercest defenders would claim he is remotely groundbreaking. A laid-back, mustachioed, regular guy possessed of an easy-going charm, he simply perches on a bar stool and plays smooth, well-crafted country and western powered by earworm melodies.
His six-piece band are slick and his lyrical themes are repetitive. Wallen sings about drinking to forget women who leave him because he drinks. He bids these escapers from his serial doomed relationships a self-pitying, passive-aggressive adieu: “If I’m the problem, you might be the reason.” Then he drinks some more, and longs for their return.
These laments have the ring of authenticity. Wallen’s appeal rests largely in him being a flawed everyman figure (with two recent court convictions for public intoxication). The maudlin Superman finds him sighing that his toddler son will one day learn of his dad’s transgressions: “That bottle’s my kryptonite, brings a man of steel down to his knees.” It’s hokum, but oddly moving.
Love Somebody has a melody as exquisite as Fleetwood Mac at their most swooning as Wallen craves a romance “stronger than the whiskey”. The witty wordplay inherent in all the best country is present and correct: Whiskey Glasses begins, “Poor me… pour me another drink.” And then Wallen takes his leave and ambles off to notch up a million more streams.
