Morgan Wallen’s new album is stubbornly long. Live with it
Published May 16, 2025 • 3 minute read
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Country music superstar Morgan Wallen. Photo by Spidey SmithReviews and recommendations are unbiased and products are independently selected. Postmedia may earn an affiliate commission from purchases made through links on this page.
We all have our bad days. Morgan Wallen’s just get more publicity. Like in late March when he abruptly walked off the set of “Saturday Night Live,” made haste to his private jet and posted from the tarmac to social media, “Get me to God’s country.” Or that fateful night last year in downtown Nashville where Wallen got so sozzled he started chucking patio furniture off a rooftop bar. Are these the true spoils of fame? An entitlement to the tantrums that the rest of us, perpetually mired in our plebeian frustration and fatigue, can only dream about?
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So long as country music remains committed to upholding notions of authenticity – whatever that could possibly mean in this age of fraud and grift – there won’t be any separating the art from the artist in Nashville, which necessitates an abundance of forgiving and forgetting. Wallen has shown us exactly how it works. In 2021, he was caught on camera using a racial slur, then went on to become that year’s top-selling country artist. His sprawling new album, smirkingly titled “I’m the Problem,” is expected to perform just as well, confirming the 32-year-old Tennessee native as the biggest Nashville star shining over God’s country, my country, your country and everywhere else.
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There’s a lot to sort through on this record – contrition, double-downing, bitterness, abandon – and across 37 tracks, clocking in just shy of two hours, Wallen’s self-awareness drifts in and out of focus. It’s as if he’s living through these songs in real time. For better or for worse, so are we. But whereas Wallen’s previous efforts – 2023’s “One Thing at a Time” and 2021’s “Dangerous: The Double Album” – felt overconfident and overlong, “I’m the Problem” nearly earns its girth. This guy used to sound like Sisyphus pushing his ball of contradictions up the hill. Now it’s like the boulder has grown into something planet-size, and its gravity demands to be obeyed.
To better understand these changing laws of physics, cue up “TN,” a surging, mid-tempo lament that finds Wallen missing a lover who’s up and left Tennessee, forcing our narrator to weigh his loneliness against the attributes of a home he refuses to leave:
“It’s still got the JD in a Dixie,
and the UT on the TV,
and that Smokey Mountain smoke I’m breathing,
but I’d bet my last Rocky Top dollar that she’s in
CO, or CA, or back home in GA,
anyplace she won’t see me.
Now the one thing I’s needing
is the only damn thing I couldn’t keep in TN.”
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There’s just so much to love in that hook. The internal rhyme. The hopscotch phrasing. The alphabet soupiness. That aching voice doing those lyrical somersaults. Just because his heart is broken doesn’t mean he can’t have fun playing with the pieces, right? Wallen unfurls similar rhyme schemes on “Don’t We,” another cut co-written by Ashley Gorley, a Music Row hitmaker whose fluency in hip-hop is enough to make you wonder whether he or Wallen have ever heard Cam’ron rap about “drinking sake on a Suzuki, we in Osaka Bay.” Regardless, of the 49 songwriters Wallen hired to work on this behemoth, Gorley scores highest for getting the singer to spit his lines like stones skipping across water.
And while Wallen is singing as nimbly as ever, his narration tends to sink into his bad rep, dodging responsibilities, shifting blame. A steel guitar lick whistles around like cold wind on the album’s curtain-raising title track, with Wallen seething, “If I’m the problem, well, you might be the reason.” On the perversely up-tempo “Kick Myself,” he talks about trying to clean up, but ultimately decides to give up: “Maybe that’d work if I was someone else.” On the markedly gentler “Superman,” he does some higher-altitude stocktaking, imagining his mistakes through the eyes of his child: “Superman’s still just a man, sometimes.”
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There’s no discernible arc to all these ups and downs, but instead of feeling erratic or careless, “I’m the Problem” feels lifelike. By the time Wallen reaches the last song, a gorgeous paranoiac ballad titled “I’m a Little Crazy,” he’s making his instability sound entirely reasonable: “The only thing keeping these tracks on the train: knowing I’m a little crazy but the world’s insane.”
In other words, existence is vast, and cruel, and it isn’t stopping, so neither is this music. When you have this kind of talent for turning bad days into good songs, you might do everything in your power to make sure both keep coming.
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