Free to focus on his music, Wallen tried out for The Voice. The swoop-haired singer’s blind audition was not with a country song, but with Howie Day’s “Collide.” He started out on Usher’s team, then Adam Levine’s after a steal, singing songs by Avicii and One Direction. The week he sang his first country song, Florida Georgia Line’s “Stay,” he was eliminated from the competition.After an initial indie release, Wallen signed with the indie label Big Loud and started recording. His debut single for the label, “The Way I Talk,” which he didn’t have a hand in writing, was a charming examination of rural speech patterns that “got some words you never heard/’less you come from down yonder.” But it was his alignment with then-bro kings Florida Georgia Line on the summer-barbecue-ready “Up Down” that put him on the track to superstardom with his first country-radio Number One. Even so, during this time, his live sets included a medley that mashed together hits by Linkin Park, Bon Jovi, Fall Out Boy, and Kings of Leon.
Some time between the spring and summer of 2018, Wallen’s look went from auxiliary member of an alt-rock band to lumberjack-erotica cover model with the addition of a Joe Diffie-style mullet and the subtraction of sleeves from his array of flannel shirts. This is when his imperial era really began, in particular with “Whiskey Glasses,” a song that was written by Ben Burgess and Kevin Kadish. It was a potent combination of catchy and clever, with its rousing “line ‘em up” bridge that was easy for a crowd to remember and yell back at Wallen. There were also more than a few funny lines about drinking one’s way through a breakup — “Poor me, pour me another drink,” for example. It’s symbolic in a way, since alcohol has played a role in some of what would happen to Wallen over the next couple of years.
Diplo Collabo
Immediately after “Whiskey Glasses” took its over-the-limit bow at Number One, Wallen had a double dose of radio saturation with “Chasin’ You” and “Heartless.” “Chasin’ You,” Wallen’s final single from If I Know Me, was released in late July 2019 and was a slower burn in terms of chart success. Two weeks after its release, “Heartless,” a moody trap-country collaboration with producer and trend-spotter Diplo, promptly blew up on streaming sites. Everything was falling in place for a big next era, though there was a darker side to Wallen’s emerging stardom
In May 2020, which as you may recall was very early in the pandemic, Wallen was arrested for public intoxication and disorderly conduct after being kicked out of Kid Rock’s Big Ass Honky Tonk Rock N’ Roll Steakhouse in downtown Nashville. Which brings up a couple of questions. One, were these Broadway places not observing any kind of pandemic safety rules? And two, what the hell kind of nonsense does someone have to be doing to get kicked out of Kid Rock’s Big Ass Honky Tonk Rock N’ Roll Steakhouse? The answer to the first is clearly no, and the second, according to The Tennessean, was for “kicking glass items.” He’d have walked away from it with a clean record, if only he didn’t reportedly try to fight people in the street outside and officers intervened.
Wallen’s next musical era was ramping up later in 2020. The new singles “More Than My Hometown” and “7 Summers” had an unmistakably sensitive bent even when the music was more muscular. The songs were immediately popular and helped land him an artist’s dream gig, as the musical guest on Saturday Night Live on Oct. 10, 2020. Three days before his scheduled appearance he was swiftly booted from the gig when photos of the singer partying in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, after a Crimson Tide football game began circulating. The images showed him kissing multiple women and playing guitar for an unmasked crowd, still very much in pandemic times. SNL was only just getting back to in-person shows with rigorous testing, and they weren’t having it. But Wallen ended up back on the show a few weeks later and even got to joke about the experience in a sketch with host Jason Bateman.
The Slur
Wallen’s double-length second album, Dangerous, was released on Jan. 8, 2021, a 30-track monster that included “More Than My Hometown,” “7 Summers,” a new version of “Heartless,” and a cover of Jason Isbell’s “Cover Me Up.” A mere three weeks after it came out, Wallen was captured on camera saying the n-word to a group of friends as he arrived back home after a night out. The fallout was swift — country radio dropped him and country institutions uninvited him from their awards shows. He apologized, saying “I promise to do better,” and mostly kept a low profile, making a little time to go golfing with Eric Church while things were quiet. The radio ban lasted about six months before the Dangerous track “Sand in My Boots” was in heavy rotation.
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