Morgan Wallen Is Country's Next Superstar (Whether You Like It Or Not)

[Music] what's up guys welcome back to the channel i feel excited for this video not only just because the blue couch is behind me and the wolf and the guitar and the bookcase just feel kind of normal i'm also feeling emotionally normal i'm not going to make a big deal of this but just i unlisted the last video because i was not in a good place i'm doing a lot better now i was like i think quarantine was getting to me i was feeling a lot of anxiety and ultimately it's not that serious we're just

here talking about music and i just have to express my opinion and i don't you know need to try and worry about representing every other person's opinion i just needed some people i trust to kind of hold me by the shoulders look me in the eye and say dude i love you and you're overthinking it okay and uh sometimes you need that and we all definitely need it in 2020. i also want to say before we get started that i've got some new merch some very very very very limited experimental merch so we've got one

shirt that says thicket and then i have another shirt made over here that says uh it's okay to think about country music with a little mock-up of the thinker statue but as a thinker cowboy i feel like it is okay to think about country music and you all know that i think thicket we didn't even print 100 of these i just wanted to you know see how it goes the merch game's weird it's you know expensive it's an investment and i just want to test the water so if you go to the link in my

bio down below it's just like gradywsmith.bigcartel.com these will be shipped out to you they're soft they're like pretty normal sizing i mean this is a large and i'm like five nine and two hundred right now so there's your kind of sizing but enough about me let's get to the point of this video and that's that we just got to check back in with mr morgan wallen yeah because i was looking at the spotify top 50. i don't know if you ever do this on spotify you can go over to charts look at the us top

50 and you can see the top 50 stream songs of the day it's almost never ever ever going to include a country artist maybe you'll get one of those collaborations that kane brown does with marshmallow or something but morgan wiling dropped a new song called seven summers the other day and it debuted at number three on that chart ahead of huge debuts like miley cyrus new song and behind you know the infamous by cardi b as soon as i saw that number i knew i needed to make another video on morgan wallin just because it

seems like he is becoming the superstar of this generation of country music and i've made content on morgan before i did a video on him last year just when he was at the start of kind of what seemed to be a turning point of here's this guy that seems like a pop country star he's collaborated with florida georgia line but he did this cover of jason isabel's cover me up that kind of had people taking a second look days we flew off the pace then the song whiskey glasses became a giant sleeper hit that seemed

like it was just never going to stop being a hit and i would say that his momentum has just not stopped for this entire year it's kind of crazy to see i mean that diplo collaboration he did heartless became a big hit as did songs he dropped like this bar and his current single more than my hometown and then now obviously seven summers which we'll talk about again in a little bit to put it very simply morgan walling just has that x factor that cool about him right now and if you ask some of the

zoomers on tick tock they might say they're vibing with him or that he's like country king or that he's like the ceo of country music or that he's killing the game whatever it is and i gotta say someone on tiktok told me to chin up king when i was feeling really down and that makes me feel great but it does seem like morgan wallin has that certain genusey quoi that just makes some celebrities pop where every single thing they do it's almost like they can't lose i mean even when he was arrested in the spring

for some disorderly conduct at kid rock's bar that was a positive press cycle for him his mug shot was sort of a joke of the internet almost in the kind of vein of barstool humor and i think he gets the internet i mean after that incident he did a photo op with kid rock to bring up barstool again he appeared on their instagram page with hardy and was playing beer pong with them not to toot my own horn but like he came on my channel which is not a thing that a lot of country stars

are gonna normally want to do organ also became a father this year with his ex-fiance and even that did not become like some salacious story the way i thought it might people were really just happy for him by and large on the internet but for whatever reason whether it's just about the music or it's about kind of the marketing around him or it's just the fact that there's a lot of girls that simp from morgan wallin and like the cut off flannels and mullet he's happening so i guess the question we're left to ask is

is this just hype or is there more to this guy than a cool haircut and as i've been arguing for a little while now i think there's definitely more to the success of morgan wallen than just the hype i mean i think he's definitely a mix of a pop sound and a country sound but i also think he's really good i actually did one of those perceptual maps recently where you have two axes and on one of them is country to pop and the other is bad to good and i would say he's between country

and pop and he's a lot closer to good than he is to bad and the first and biggest factor in that is just his voice just like with luke combs when i say like we just gotta start right here with this amazing voice i think morgan's voice is crazy i thought it'd be me that's something i think i kind of overlooked on his first album is just how different his voice is that rasp in it and the way he kind of yells some things but pulls way back it's almost like if you took the vocal

timbre of chris stapleton not necessarily the power and you mixed it with the kind of yelpiness of eric church's voice that's kind of where i see morgan wallin [Music] i think his voice is suited to a lot of different things it can go a little bit rockier it can go kind of like smooth sexy r b i think it works in all those places and if you listen to some of these songs he posts on instagram where it's just him acoustic i think you might take a second look and realize man he's got something really

special and different like that demo written in the wind and why it always takes her with it all the brains are back now yeah i've always been wondering [Music] it's beautiful i'm not always as crazy about this thing he does in his songs that's kind of this talk singing often it's just on like one or two notes it kind of will remind me of like if you ever went to an episcopalian church or something and they're like poor me pour me another drink i don't want to feel nothing so stupid but i will say it's

unique to him it's kind of his thing and i think it's kind of working and also i am loving joey moy's production lately joey moy is both like the most successful producer ever and one of the most divisive you know him for producing the sounds of bands like nickelback and when he stopped working with nickelback he went over and started working with florida georgia line until very recently he was their main producer and he knows how to make sounds that clearly work on the radio but if you listen to a lot of music can just

feel like an overbearing wall of sound one that can just kind of pummel some of the more nuanced emotions that you sometimes want to feel in music but i don't know if i'm changing or if he's changing or if it's some mix of both but lately i think joey moy is hitting a production stride that is so much more agreeable than some of the stuff he was making early on in the career of florida georgia line and honestly a lot country i feel like i'm hearing so much more instrumentation currently joey moy is also working

with hardy and then larry fleet you guys know about larry fleet he's got that song where i find god crazy big voice he's awesome and i'm becoming a bigger and bigger fan of hardy someone i never would have expected to say that about but anyway i think his production style and morgan's voice are a really good match i just do and i think this new song seven summers sounds really good and i think it's gonna be kind of a career song for morgan wallin [Music] now there's been a demo floating around of this song for

many many many months and fans were so hyped for it to get released and lyrically i totally get that this is like a snow globe of a song that morgan wallen is like shaking this memory from seven years ago of this girl in him that had an amazing summer of drinking a six-pack by the river and he's just letting himself turn into his inner sad boy as he thinks about this time from seven summers ago and wonders if she's thinking about it too all the while he's kind of heaping the sadness on himself imagining like

she's probably got a kid she's probably got a ring she's probably got a house but do you ever get to thinking about this boy from east tennessee it's both a pity party and a sort of wistful nostalgic moment in a way that makes it feel happy and sad at the same time [Music] it kind of reminds me of what taylor swift is able to do so effectively in her songwriting you look at a song like august on her new record and it's that same mix where you don't even know if she feels bad or if

she's kind of happily remembering something like a bottle of wine there's that longing that's inherent in the lyrics and i will say that the co-writers of the song shane macanally and josh osborne i think that's their sweet spot they understand that kind of distant longing so well but production-wise i think the song sounds great too there's a certain sparkle on it you can hear the piano you can hear the guitar really clearly [Music] and i know some of the vocal overtones might give it this kind of 1970s laid-back feel but in this case i think

it works quite well and it resists taking that sound a little too far and putting in a big drum pad beat making it feel synthetic to me yeah this feels lushly produced but it also still feels really organic i've seen all the things you all have sent me where people are feeling really frustrated that the song is overproduced and i saw people saying that this isn't a country song now it's a pop song but i just don't hear it guys i think that the new version is actually country than the demo it's just not acoustic

it's just not like a basement tape of the song and i think some of that criticism will wear off as people just get used to the new version sometimes when you get attached to an acoustic version the produced version can feel bad you know remember how we all felt when the real version of drowning by chris young came out except that's an example where i feel like the production did go too far and it kind of did miss the mark i'll be really intrigued to see if the streaming numbers keep up for this song i

imagine they will and on that note hits daily double just recently put out a chart of the biggest year to date streaming for the country music world and it was interesting given that i just made a video about this and the top most streamed artist of 2020 so far so this was like for the first half of the year through july maybe was luke combs extravagantly he had almost double the number of streams that jason aldean did and then it was morgan wallin in third place now if you remember back to my streaming video morgan

wallin and luke combs both had just under 10 million monthly listeners on spotify so it was interesting to me to see this chart and see that they're in the top three when people that have way more monthly listeners like maren morris or kane brown were lower down on the chart than them and i just wanted to put this addendum in here as i did more research on what monthly listeners actually signifies on spotify it means unique accounts that have listened to at least some song that includes that artist in the past month so people that

have crossovers in the pop world or somewhere else like kane brown and maren morris have a lot of those they're gonna have a higher monthly listener account because more accounts are listening to them but they're not necessarily getting more total streams and you can look at the numbers of someone like luke combs or like morgan while and just say damn if they have a lower monthly listener account but that much higher of numbers that means their fans love them and are dedicatedly listening over and over and over again and now with the release of seven

summers i imagine morgan wallin's number is just gonna skyrocket because by all accounts this seems to be a smash it's like number one all genre on itunes so anyway i just wanted to make a video checking in on morgan wildland because it's not every day you see these kinds of numbers and it seems like he's going to be one of the defining superstars of this generation so let me know your thoughts on the song let me know your thoughts on morgan in general check out the merch if you're interested in it and i'll see you

guys very soon with more videos [Music] you