She’s 22 years old, with a recording career that began just five years ago. But Tate McRae feels at times like “time is moving so fast and slipping out of my hands.”
So when she sat at a piano on a satellite stage during her recent Miss Possessive Tour at Detroit’s Little Caesars Arena, the singer, songwriter and dancer from Calgary wanted to “see if everybody in Detroit has been here since day one.”
That would actually be 2016, when McRae was a finalist on Fox TV’s “So You Think You Can Dance” after winning international awards for her footwork. She would go on to dance for special performances by Justin Bieber and Demi Lovato. During 2017, however, McRae switched her YouTube channel from dance videos to performances of original songs; the first, “One Day,” drew more than 40 million views and led to the song’s release as a single, which hit platinum in the U.S.
And McRae -- who, by the way, can still do the splits better than any of her pop peers -- hasn’t looked back since.
She’s logged gold and platinum (and better) singles such as “Teenage Mind,” “You Broke Me First,” “You,” “She’s All I Wanna Be,” “10:35,” “Greedy,” “Exes” and “It’s OK I’m OK.” She’s released three studio albums -- 2023’s “Think Later” was certified platinum and this year’s “So Close to What” debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 -- as well as “The One Day LP” mixtape compiling those early YouTube songs. And now the Miss Possessive Tour, McRae’s third road trip, is taking her around the world, already in South America and Europe and now making its way across North America -- including an Aug. 29 stop at Cleveland’s Rocket Arena.
Expressing her gratitude to the more than 15,000 fans in Detroit, McRae said that the “Miss Possessive” album “means so much to me. I wrote so many songs...I feel like they really resonated with how I’m feeling as a 22-year-old girl right now.” And despite the songs of angst and heartbreak, the nearly 100-minute concert showed McRae to be feeling, appropriately, pretty good.
And pretty sexy. With a wide age range of mostly female fans looking on -- many dressed in the many sporting branded T8 t-shirts or seriously skimpy attire ala the star -- McRae led with the libido. The first look at her was underneath the stage, making out with one of her eight dancers as they prepared to hit the stage. And throughout the first of the five “acts” that comprise the show, McRae -- sporting flesh-baring two-piece outfits -- and company bumped and grinded their way through tightly choreographed versions of songs such as “No I’m not in love,” “2 hands,” “guilty conscience,” “Purple lace bra” and “Like I do,” many accompanied by pillars of flame or other pyrotechnics.
Suffice to say that there were likely some interesting conversations between the youngest fans and their parents on the ride home that night.
Things leveled out as the night went on, however. The third act found her in a black, gown-light outfit on the rear-arena stage, which elevated during performances of “Greenlight” and “Nostalgia,” two of the 13 “So Close to What” tracks she spotlighted during the show. Then McRae settled behind the piano for a medley of those early YouTube songs, sandwiching “One Day” within “that way,” “rubberband” and the breakup ode “feel like s***.” “You Broke Me First” put her back in the air, and “run for the hills” found her running back to the main stage, slapping hands with fans in the two general admission pits that flanked the runway.
Throughout the night McRae also demonstrated a keen awareness of, and how to use the technology ailable to her -- not in the (literally) high-flying manner of a P!nk or Katy Perry but rather using a camera (who’s operator was as much a part of the ensemble as any of the dancers) to create a visual show within the physical one. McRae continuously peered meaningfully into the lens, even when surrounded by the sea of fans, and mugged with the dancers during “bloodonmyhands,” finishing in one of the pits, posing and blowing kisses in front of fans.
During “Just Keep Watching,” her entry on the “F1” film soundtrack, McRae was surrounded by a circle of motion-capture cameras that created a visual blur for the screens. And as she made her four outfit changes the camera tracked McRae on her journeys back to the stage.
Her last two “acts,” meanwhile, were filled with pop anthems and dance party mania, including a cleverly staged “Revolving Door” during which she nigated through a moving line of rectangular doorways. “Exes,” “She’s All I Wanna Be” and encores of “Sports Car” and the Top 10 hit “Greedy” came in a joyful, high-octane succession, and “It’s OK I’m OK,” which closed the main set, delivered a fitting message that McCrae is indeed OK, for now, and likely ready for more -- and bigger -- things in years to come.
Tate McRae and Zara Larsson perform at 7 p.m. Friday, Aug. 29 at Rocket Arena, 1 Center Court, Cleveland. 216-420-2000 or rocketarena.com.