Morgan Wallen Is Launching a New Festival. Is the Music World Ready for His Takeover?

On Saturday night, Morgan Wallen lit a cigar before going on stage in Charlotte, North Carolina for the 87th and final show of his One Night at a Time world tour. For the last two years, the 31-year-old country musician has traveled the world with a life-sized replica of his grandmother’s small-town Tennessee front porch as a set in his stadium show, a reference to the cover of his third album, One Thing at a Time. On the tour’s debut night, March 15, 2023, in Auckland, New Zealand, Wallen was a genre favorite whose crossover to pop wasn’t assured. He’s since become one of the US’s biggest music stars and one of Nashville’s best bets, recently smashing his own record for history’s highest-grossing country tour.

Now, Wallen is planning for what’s next. Last week, he released his first new single, “Love Somebody” and announced the Sand in My Boots festival, in partnership with concert promoter AEG, scheduled to run May 16–18 in Gulf Shores, Alabama. Naturally, the three-day festival will include sets from his friends and collaborators Post Malone, Ernest Keith Smith, who performs as ERNEST, and Michael Hardy, better known as HARDY, and other big names in country music, including Brooks & Dunn, Bailey Zimmerman, and Chase Rice. But Wallen also handpicked performers from beyond his original music scene, with rapper Wiz Khalifa joining Three 6 Mafia, T-Pain, 2 Chainz, and Moneybagg Yo, and indie-rock band the War on Drugs—one of Wallen’s longtime favorite acts—headlining a list of bands that includes Future Islands, Real Estate, and Wild Nothing.

Working with Wallen on the festival has been “a dream come true,” said Stacy Vee, vice president of festival booking for Goldenvoice, the production company behind the Coachella and Stagecoach festivals. She added that the lineup is “one of the most eclectic and electric” experiences she’s put on.

The festival is the bow on a few years of Wallen’s rapid rise to pop stardom. “There’s no way when they signed Morgan that they were like, he’s going to be the one, he’s going to be the next Taylor Swift–type person in the genre,” Hardy told VF. He acknowledged Wallen’s talent as a singer and songwriter, but compared the total package to a small-town entrepreneur with the Midas touch. “I knew a guy from my hometown, he’s a business owner, and everything he touched turned to gold. He was a hard worker and a really smart guy, but some of it was just pure luck.”

Wallen’s current industry stature is a far cry from where it was in February 2021, when the artist and his longtime label, Big Loud, came to a fork in the road. They had the number-one album in the nation, a few songs banked for a follow-up, and a raging controversy after TMZ published a video of Wallen saying a racial slur to a friend in his driveway. Condemnation from inside and outside of Nashville was swift. His music was pulled from the biggest radio stations, Spotify removed promotion of his recent release, Dangerous: The Double Album, from its playlist, and other popular musicians, including Maren Morris, Jason Isbell, and Kelsea Ballerini, spoke out against Wallen. The singer had to prove he either wanted to be an entertainer for all, or embrace the “canceled” label and consign himself to the worst type of second act.

He made his choice quickly, and it seemed like an easy one. After filming a hangdog apology video, he went to a San Diego rehab facility for a 30-day stay to address his relationship with alcohol. He even told his fans that they shouldn’t be supporting him. “I was never that guy that people were portraying me to be,” Wallen said in an interview with Billboard in December 2023 regarding the video. “If I was that guy, then I wouldn’t have cared. I wouldn’t have apologized. I wouldn’t have done any of that if I really was that guy that people were saying about me.”

Curiously, or not, the album stayed affixed to the top of the charts for over a year. Had the scandal actually helped his career? Fearful that it had, Wallen and his team did some back-of-the-envelope math and settled on $500,000 as the rough value of all the press he’d received, however negative, and promised it to Black-serving organizations, including the Black Music Action Coalition. And then, Wallen was left in an odd place—too popular to be ignored but seemingly too toxic to remain mainstream.

For the company that had supported him for six years, the cancellation problem was a thorny one. With the support of their partners at Republic Records, Big Loud released a statement “suspending” the singer from the label. They removed him from their website and stopped promoting his singles to country radio. It was a public punishment, but because of the nature of his arrangement with Big Loud, Wallen didn’t lose logistical support from the company. By August 2021, they were once again promoting his singles to radio stations after they quietly lifted the ban.

Topping the asterisked success of Dangerous was incredibly important to Wallen. In 2021, the singer returned to the studio and doubled down on the Nashville method of group songwriting and polished recording that had worked for him previously. Surrounded by a team of rowdy yet intelligent musicians in their 20s and early 30s, Wallen reengineered his pop career by diving deeper into the eclectic mix of country, rock, and hip-hop influences he listens to in his free time. The gambit worked. In early 2023, Wallen found himself on the pop charts again with the release of his blockbuster single “Last Night,” which topped the Hot 100 for 21 weeks.

Most of the work was done inside the Big Loud building on Nashville’s famous Music Row, where decorated songwriter Craig Wiseman—best known for cowriting the 2004 Tim McGraw hit “Live Like You Were Dying”—built a boot camp for songwriters and artists, and producer Joey Moi—who worked on a string of hits for Nickelback—holds court in the studio. Wiseman, Moi, and CEO Seth England signed Wallen in 2016, investing in him as both a songwriter and an artist.

Wallen’s arrival at the company coincided with an internal experiment, a new approach to making stars by turning the Nashville ethos into a lifestyle. On the third floor of Big Loud’s headquarters, writers who are signed to the company have rooms where they host writing sessions, colloquially known as a “write.” The company also sends its writers on the road with artists, so some songs originate on tour buses. This is how Wallen developed a working relationship and genuine friendship with fellow writers Hardy and Smith. Together, they wrote some of Wallen’s earliest hits, and their songwriting sensibilities anchor many of the 36 tracks on One Thing at a Time.

Drinking and partying are implicit in the culture, and it’s not uncommon for a writing session to start after a few beers at a nearby bar, Losers, and last long into the night. Mentorship and self-improvement are also part of the deal at Big Loud. Hardy says that Wiseman has a reputation for testing a young writer’s work ethic by leaving the room during their first session together. You pass if you’ve made significant progress on a song by the time he returns.

This balance of freedom, opportunity, and discipline is at the heart of their system, placing it in contrast to the more carefully curated approaches to launching careers that you might see in other Music Row shops. “I have to give Seth England the most credit for building a culture at Big Loud that feels like if you create something great, you immediately can release it and put it out in the world,” says Nicolle Galyon, a songwriter and artist who started her own women-focused imprint at the company. “It can often feel like you’re writing and the song can just disappear into the ether.”

Even before the TMZ controversy, Wallen and his group of writers had already been thinking about scandal, masculinity, adulthood, and the effects of living in the public eye, themes that found their way into their songwriting. For over a year, anticipation that Wallen would have a major impact beyond country music had been building inside Big Loud. But in May 2020, he was arrested for disorderly conduct while out on the streets of Nashville (the charges were later dropped). Next came a high profile cancellation of a Saturday Night Live slot, after he was filmed violating COVID-19 protocols (read: kissing women at a bar).

Though Wallen’s contract was suspended in early 2021, on Music Row, work continued on some of the songs that would eventually become One Thing at a Time. At Big Loud, the writers lean toward Nashville natives, and the group skews young and heavily male, with a few older figures around for guidance. The stories that come out about the headquarters have the feel of any creative workplace dominated by millennials—snacks and casual clothing, lots of laughter, occasionally some beers—but turned up to 11. “We have the kind of job where you get here early, try to stay late,” says writer Rocky Block. “You have friends around, which keeps it easy.”

Industry hands often describe the early months of being a writer in Nashville as akin to “speed-dating”—working with as many people as possible until you gel with a group of like-minded creatives. Among Big Loud’s current crop of writers, nearly everyone grew up listening to classic rock and country with their parents, before getting into hip-hop in the mid-2000s. They’re inspired by a grab bag of rap techniques, like Eminem’s approach to assonance, internal rhyme, and triplet flows, and mixtape culture’s “first thought, best thought” approach to (not) editing. To this ethos, Wallen injects a bit of emotional vulnerability and endearing sad sack vibes.

Among the team, respect for him as an artist is off the charts. Sometimes Wallen is around for “writes” and sometimes he isn’t, but his hold on this group of professional songwriters, several of who have become performers themselves, is strong. One of the more surprising songs on One Thing at a Time, “180 (Lifestyle),” has an unusually long list of cowriters. Smith started freestyling to the beat of “Lifestyle,” a 2014 mixtape song by Birdman, Young Thug, and Rich Homie Quan, while writers Block, Blake Pendergrass, and Jordan Dozzi were in the room at Big Loud. The latter three finished up the resultant song, adding a melodious guitar line, with the sense that it would be perfect for Wallen.

The origin story of the album’s biggest song follows a similar pattern with a slight twist. John Byron, a Nashville-raised songwriter who is signed to Big Loud, actually wasn’t in his room at the headquarters when he started work on “Last Night.” In December 2022, Byron traveled to Miami for a session with Jacob Kasher Hindlin, the pop veteran who has written hits with Dua Lipa, Charlie Puth, Maroon 5, Kesha, and many more. Byron had another write scheduled, but the pair were having a good time, so Hindlin hopped on a flight and tagged along to Nashville. They went to Hutton Hotel to a room set up by veteran hip-hop producer Charlie Handsome. (Real name: Ryan Vojtesak, but everyone calls him Charlie.) Also present that afternoon was Ashley Gorley, a country writer with 75 country number ones under his belt.

There was little sense among the quickly assembled group that the session could prove chart historic. Vojtesak played a catchy riff on his guitar, and the rest of the team jumped in to develop a flow and suggest lyrics. “You have a bunch of cool people in there doing their own thing, and it just kinda became what it was,” Byron said. “It was just a melting pot of different abilities, and it took us a couple of hours to do.” About a week later, they played a demo for Wallen. With the feeling that it could be a hit, he recorded it later that day and released it a few months later. And lo, the song of the summer was born.

It was one of the last tracks Wallen cut for his third album, and it sealed the record as a crossover success, eclipsing anything he’d done before. The song made Byron an in-demand songwriter. Over the last few months, he’s been working with pop stars.

The One Thing at a Time era was just as important to nearly everyone on the long list of names that populate its list of credits, and its influence is already spilling into pop music. Post Malone invited many of Wallen’s collaborators to write for his country project, which spawned its own number-one hit, “I Had Some Help,” featuring Wallen on the track and Smith as a cowriter. Pendergrass was all over this summer’s hit soundtrack for the movie Twisters. For the most part, the team is coming back together for Wallen’s next project.

“Part of the secret is that Seth and Morgan, and all of those people at the label, are so good at identifying songs from wherever they come from,” Pendergrass says. “They don’t care if it’s someone who has a long reputation. They just know they have the ability to identify good songs from anywhere.”