Morgan Wallen’s American Odyssey

About 10 miles west of the border between Florida and Alabama, Gulf Shores has held the Hangout Music Festival on its sugar white sand beaches for the past 15 years. The affair has revolved, as have so many of its peers over the same period, around a mix of pop music insurgents and established stalwarts that could comfortably suit an all-ages, genre-agnostic crowd—Zach Bryan and Lana Del Rey headlined last year. Then, in the last year of their franchise agreement with the town, festival organizers worked out a new plan: hand the reins over to the tastes, name, and sway of Morgan Wallen.

The Sand in My Boots festival, the country megastar’s takeover of the Hangout that took place last month, was a showcase for Wallen’s collaborators and influences—with a lineup pulled from Nashville as well as from hip-hop, EDM, and indie rock—and an emblem of his gravitational pull. Between her sets, Ashlee Williss, a Jacksonville-raised DJ who said her flight from Los Angeles had been half-full of festival attendees, took stock of Wallen’s ascent and her own. She describes herself as the first female country music DJ, having pivoted after starting out as a singer-songwriter. She wore mirrored sunglasses with rhinestone edges and stamped my arm with her stage name, DJ Bad Ash.

“I started booking all these festivals as literally the only girl,” Williss said. “It’s finally my time.”

The festival was named for one of Wallen’s several karaoke-level hits in recent years, which he has been touring at stadiums across the US and Europe. The song addresses his great subject, the simmering discontent born out of romantic wounds, and when he plays it, he sits alone at a piano. The crowd turns prayerful as he sings a ballad of pain, regret, and a Chevy Silverado.

Over the last several years, Wallen has developed something more vexing and tangled than a split screen reputation. Following a string of drinking-related controversies and the publication of a 2021 video in which he used a racial slur, he became a bogeyman in the popular imagination. He has also become, in all manner of streaming and chart accountings, the biggest act in American music, not so much in spite of the backlash but alongside it. Wallen, a restrained and somewhat withholding presence in the few interviews he gives, is alternately considered music’s most radioactive and celebrated personality.

On his last tour, Wallen’s performances typically began with a boxing-style walkout through a stadium tunnel. In Las Vegas last year, he was accompanied by Tom Brady and Mike Tyson, the week after his appearance with Patrick Mahomes and Travis Kelce in Kansas City. Other costars have included Hulk Hogan, Pat McAfee, and Theo Von, the comedian and podcaster who conducted one of Donald Trump’s defining campaign interviews and recently joined the president in Qatar to perform for servicemembers. Taken together, the group offers a portrait of Wallen’s affinities, and a way to account for his enduring success. Somewhere in this diffuse but distinguishable collision of sports, new media, and music are the contours of a cultural mainstream in which country and football are stronger than ever, Austin and Nashville are the podcasting power centers, and there is no contest over Wallen’s stature.

On the last night of the festival, Wallen walked out alone. As a performer, he’s fluid, dynamic, and reticent. “Man, y’all love them toxic songs,” he told the crowd in a rare bout of commentary. “Guess I’ll keep singing them.” As his set ended, Wallen said he would play longer if he could, citing local regulations.

The baseball field at Gibbs High School, near Knoxville, was recently renamed for Wallen, who was born to a pastor and a teacher in a Tennessee town of around 1,300. He met the Nashville musician Ernest at an industry party in 2015, only figuring out later that they had played against each other in high school. Adding Hardy, a heavy metal lover from Mississippi, to their songwriting unit, Wallen and Ernest formed the epicenter of the country boom of the last few years.

The trio worked with producers affiliated with an eclectic group of artists including Nickelback, Young Thug, and Post Malone, and ultimately cultivated a strain of hip-hop-inflected country music that, in short order, spawned several microgenerations of descendants. Wallen’s gravelly twang, set against acoustic guitars and trap beats, defined the sound. For a period, his mullet defined the look, with a pervasiveness among white teens that called to mind the influence Eminem wielded in the early 2000s. “You see a new artist,” Aaron Ryan, an editor for the Chicago-based country news site Whiskey Riff, told me, “and you think, Oh, that guy’s just trying to be Morgan Wallen.”

As Ernest paced the stage during his Sunday afternoon festival set, he described the scene as “MTV Spring Break but better.” Along the water, I stopped by Monster Beach Club, an activation for the energy drink company that maintains a heavy presence in racing and action sports. Janey Lee, a Monster Energy Girl of about a decade from San Diego, was among the onstage dancers for the beach party’s country-EDM DJ sets. “I didn’t realize that I knew so many of his songs,” she said of Wallen.

The Sand in My Boots crowd wore crochet cover-ups over bikinis, basketball jerseys and straw hats, and, in a small but noticeable segment, tattoo sleeves and beat-up skateboarding sneakers. The Westernwear was plentiful but most often functioned as accessory—all cowboy boots considered, the audience leaned more Coachella than Shania Twain. I saw a few MAGA hats, including white and gold and bucket hat versions, but a crop of “Gulf of America” T-shirts made for the more visible political statement. A half-hearted “USA” chant broke out during the Alabama-born singer Riley Green’s Saturday night set; AL.com, a leading news site in the state, reported the following week that festival arrests were down from the Hangout events held in years prior.

During a break for shade, I found a pair of friends in town from Nashville, Stacy Best and Andrew Wendowski, who document country concerts for their social media pages and online businesses. After an elbow injury ended Wallen’s college baseball prospects, he turned to landscaping work as he tried to jump-start a music career, eventually landing a 2014 audition on The Voice that put him in front of Usher and Adam Levine. Wendowski operates an online magazine called Music Mayhem, and he said he’s been following Wallen for so long that he first saw him play in a tent outside of a bar. Now he believes Wallen is surpassing the likes of Taylor Swift and Beyoncé.

“They’re not getting bigger,” Wendowski said. “They hit the ceiling, and I feel like Morgan is still going.”

Before playing “God’s Country,” a 2019 song he cowrote for Blake Shelton, Hardy stood barefoot onstage in frayed camo shorts and draped an American flag over his shoulders. He declared the United States to be the greatest country on the planet. “If you believe that, then sing it with me,” he told the crowd. “And if you don’t, then go get a fucking beer.”

For all their cross-genre tinkering, Wallen and his cowriters are faithful to the country traditions of double entendre and knotty wordplay. They turn phrases over and over, taking, in one instance, the roster of the 1998 Atlanta Braves as the basis for an extended conceit about a doomed relationship. The contrast of city and country is a recurring setup: Benzes vs. trucks, trust fund kids vs. rednecks. As Wallen left Manhattan one night in late March, he wrote on Instagram, alongside a photo of a private jet, “Get me to God’s country.”

Following his Saturday Night Live performance that evening, Wallen had left the stage somewhat abruptly, though not vastly more so than in his typical act. The episode set off several days of frenzied news coverage. “I don’t know what goes through people’s minds when they decide to do stuff like that,” cast member Kenan Thompson told Entertainment Weekly. Wallen’s transgressions, perceived and otherwise, had by then taken on a cumulative weight, with what would have been the singer’s debut SNL appearance, in October 2020, having been axed after he broke coronavirus protocols by drinking and making out with women while out in Alabama.

Still, Wallen has mostly worn the outrage loosely. Hootie & the Blowfish frontman Darius Rucker, who appeared with him in a social media video a few months after footage emerged of Wallen using a racial slur, told a Rolling Stone podcast last year that “Morgan’s tried to really better himself and become a better person and see the world in a much better, better way.” Sam Paige, a 30-year-old music festival influencer who traveled to Sand in My Boots from Fort Lauderdale, told me that she and her manager lightly mocked a segment of Wallen’s base of support: “Oh, when did you become a fan, when he said this or when he did this or when he did that?”

Most Wallen fans I spent time with in Gulf Shores described the dynamic in passing; they were not so much energized by his errors as they were amenable to rooting for someone who had made them. “There’s so many people that maybe didn’t know who he was at first but were so anti-cancel-culture,” said Chris Brown, the father in a family of four who call themselves the Tampa Tailgaters. “They’re like, You know what, I’m going to go find out who this is and what it’s about.”

As a cultural proposition, one of the tenets of Trump 2.0 is a reordering of the pop elite: The president recently called for a “major investigation” into Kamala Harris’s endorsements from Beyoncé and other celebrities, and wrote on Truth Social last month, “Has anyone noticed that, since I said ‘I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT,’ she’s no longer ‘HOT?’” The mechanisms that anointed these singers overlapped with those that called Trump a fascist, or Wallen a racist, and both men persevered.

At a Wallen show last year at MetLife Stadium, near New York, I saw Andrew Giuliani, the son of Rudy, roaming the crowd. Around that time, Giuliani, along with Laura Loomer, was a regular outside the Manhattan courthouse where Trump was being tried on charges of falsifying business records in relation to a hush money payment made to Stormy Daniels. In Gulf Shores, the FBI’s deputy director, Dan Bongino, was in attendance amid a MAGA outcry over his recent dismissal of conspiracy theories surrounding the death of Jeffrey Epstein.

The festival after-parties took place at the Flora-Bama, a two-story beachfront honky-tonk that sits directly on the border between the two states. One night, Cody Lohden, a former paramedic and firefighter signed to Ernest’s DeVille Records label, took the stage. The crowd was shoulder to shoulder, the air was thick with sweat, and bras were hanging from ropes strung over our heads. Toward the end of his set, pleasing the crowd with sing-along American standards, Lohden played “Sweet Home Alabama” and Wallen’s 2018 hit “Whiskey Glasses.”

“I ain’t been in a bar,” Wallen said on This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von in April, “since the last time I was in a bar that everybody knows about.”

It was one of a handful of press appearances that Wallen did in the lead-up to the release of his new album last month. If he seemed a bit sheepish about his outlaw image, he was also willing to play with it. The cover art for I’m the Problem is drawn from a photo of Wallen in a courtroom last year as he pleaded guilty to reckless endangerment for having thrown a chair off the roof of a Nashville bar.

The details of Wallen’s personal life tend to emerge in third-party fragments. Hardy’s wife has recounted on a podcast how she tried to set Wallen up with leading influencer Alix Earle; former Laguna Beach star Kristin Cavallari has sprinkled tidbits of her dalliance with the singer throughout podcast and social media appearances. The distance affords Wallen an affable slipperiness and, in the moments when he has found himself in a degree of trouble, a reliable claim to antihero status. In May of last year, Nashville’s Metro Council denied a request to hang a neon sign outside of his newly opened bar.

“He gives all of us a bad name,” one council member said during the vote. “His comments are hateful, his actions are harmful, and he don’t belong in this town as far as I’m concerned.”

In December, the Nashville city council took up the vote again and approved Wallen’s sign.

Wallen also told Von that he doesn’t really listen to country music, and he has largely steered clear of an industry awards ecosystem that only briefly shunned him in the name of racial justice. His claim on authenticity appears to have tapped into a more elemental identification rather than genre convention. “If I believe it when they open their mouth and they sing it,” the Texas musician Parker McCollum recently said on the Like a Farmer podcast, describing what he perceives as true country. “I believe Morgan when he sings those songs.”

Wallen has never offered such a concrete theory of his preeminence. Among his successors, there are those more voluble. Just before the end of the festival, Bailey Zimmerman took the stage. The country singer recently had a number one hit with BigXthaPlug, a Texas rapper and Wallen affiliate who played at Sand in My Boots. Zimmerman worked on natural gas pipelines in West Virginia and built custom trucks to amass a social media following ahead of his efforts in music. As the crowd prepared for Wallen to arrive onstage as the final act, Zimmerman closed his appearance with a message.

“I’m a skinny white boy from southern Illinois, and I grew up just like you guys did,” he said. “If that doesn’t get you to believe in yourself, I don’t know what will.”