“Ain’t it strange the things you keep tucked in your heart,” he murmurs, near the end of one song. One of the advantages of his sleeveless-shirt image is that it provides him occasional opportunities to upend listeners’ expectations. On January 8th, he will release “Dangerous: The Double Album” (Big Loud), which takes pains to reassure listeners that he is still a small-town guy, albeit one with a marvellously grainy voice and a knack for singing clever songs that are sometimes wistful, sometimes rowdy, and almost always boozy-in this way, at least, he is a country traditionalist. But it is not clear that Wallen would consider this an insult. “Go to any Circle K in Indiana and you’ll find yourself a Morgan Wallen,” one user wrote. In early December, Wallen made it to “S.N.L.,” performing a couple of songs and starring in a sketch in which he reënacted his fateful trip to that Alabama bar and begged forgiveness, singing, “I thank you in advance / For giving this poor Southern boy a second Yankee chance.” On Twitter, viewers debated his hair, his hygiene, and his general persona. “It may be a second before you hear from me, for a while,” he said. Wallen acknowledged his mistake in a downbeat but charming two-minute video, apologizing for what he called “short-sighted” behavior and signalling a temporary withdrawal from the spotlight. Many more of them heard about him a few days later, when the show announced that Wallen’s appearance had been cancelled because of video footage that was circulating, on TikTok (naturally), showing him at an Alabama bar the previous weekend, sharing kisses-and, for all anyone knew, virions-with at least two different women. Some non-country listeners first heard about Wallen in the beginning of October, when “Saturday Night Live” announced that he would be the musical guest on an upcoming episode. A new single helped him maintain his radio ubiquity, and his homebound fans made him a TikTok favorite, reacting to snippets of songs and recording their own versions. Wallen was alarmed when the live-music industry shut down in March, but 2020 has turned out to be the best year of his career. An innocuous photograph of him leaning against a truck recently drew nearly half a million likes on Instagram, and almost ten thousand comments, including a prayerful declaration from a young mother in South Carolina: “Lord have mercy im bout to bust.” Through this process, Wallen became not just a singer but a character-and, in a development that seems to have surprised many Nashville professionals, a sex symbol, beloved by an army of fans who appear to be disproportionately female and thirsty. The music video depicts a fictionalized version of the makeover that Wallen underwent after “The Voice.” He rips off the sleeves of a plaid flannel shirt and shaves the sides of his long hair, transforming himself into an Everyman rock star: Bruce Springsteen meets Larry the Cable Guy, crowned with a glorious mullet. His signature hit, “Whiskey Glasses,” is a perfectly constructed ode to a woman and a drink, lost and found, respectively: “I’m a need some whiskey glasses / ’Cause I don’t wanna see the truth.” According to Billboard, it was the top country-radio song of 2019. These days, Wallen is a country-music star. He began thinking about that question, too. “They’d be, like, Where are you from?” he recalls. “It’s as manly as it gets.” Even so, Wallen was eliminated a month later, and he returned to Tennessee with a slightly higher profile, a few industry connections, and a newfound awareness that he had what many Californians considered a thick Southern accent. “Your voice is unique-it has this raspy tone, gritty sound to it,” she said. He auditioned with a husky version of “Collide,” an earnest ballad from the two-thousands, which impressed Shakira, one of the celebrity judges. for the taping, and he was unsure what kind of singer he wanted to be. Wallen had never been on an airplane until he flew to L.A. “I’m just a normal small-town kid, and I really don’t have a clue how to get into music-other than this,” he said. He was wearing a tie and a cardigan, with shoulder-length hair and most of a beard, and he explained that his promising baseball career had been ended, during his senior year in high school, by a debilitating injury to his ulnar collateral ligament. He was standing on a stage in Los Angeles, competing for a spot on “The Voice,” one of those reality shows in which established stars offer aspiring ones a chance to discover, first hand, just how heartbreaking the music industry can be. “My name is Morgan Wallen, I’m twenty years old, I’m from Knoxville, Tennessee, and I’m currently a landscaper,” he said. Nearly seven years ago, a shaggy singer with a shy smile introduced himself to America.
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