So Close to What is Tate MacRae’s 3rd studio album and many fans think her best yet. This album came out on February 21, 2025. This album, as McRae has stated in interviews, was her “stepping into her 21 year old woman self.”
Sadly, the album was leaked a month before the album was supposed to come out.
“I think it’s problematic. In today’s digital day and age, people like to make a big deal about an album release. It’s the creative property of the artist and they should be able to do what they would like with it,” Choir Teacher Christopher Eaton said.
The leak was devastating for McRae but from this she wrote two new songs, added more to the album, including Sydney Sweeney’s part on “Miss Possessive.”
The album was produced by Ryan Tedder alongside other collaborators like Blake Slatkin, Grant Boutin, Emile Haynie, Lost Boy, ILYA, and Rob Bisel, making it a collaborative effort with multiple producers involved.
In a podcast with Jake Shane, when she was asked about the title of the album and why she chose it she explained that “it’s hard to capture a whole body of work in like three words or one word.”
“At some point in the album she has to have some sort of epiphany about life and some sort of reason for why she’s doing anything because otherwise [she] feel[s] like [she’s] driving towards nothing,” McRae said.
She explained that this, “striving for perfection, the striving for the next thing, the striving for just finding who you are is like a never ending loop,”
This is what led her to come up with So Close to What for her album.
This album draws many inspirations sonically and creatively from the 2000s as so many artists have been doing for the past couple of years.
“Throughout music history new genres of music as they come up, they take what they like from old genres and they add new things,” Eaton said.
