Tate McRae was scrolling Pinterest in the middle of a writing session, her phone drifting across heartbreak quotes and random images of nice houses, when a sports car appeared on her feed. She started humming. ‘Da, da, da, oh, but you got a sports car.’ Then she stopped and looked up. The whole metaphor of the song landed in that one idle moment, and the track clicked into place around it. For an artist who had spent the better part of a year writing in hotel rooms and on tour buses, that accidental image became the anchor for the most confident creative swing of her career.
A nasty pop girl beat and the Yin Yang Twins
The song did not begin as a sports car story. It began as a wish. Songwriter Julia Michaels had long wanted a pop artist to recreate the energy of ‘The Whisper Song’ by the Yin Yang Twins, and she brought that idea into the room with McRae and producer Grant Boutin. McRae admitted she was terrified, describing herself as ‘such a sucker for melodies.’ But when Boutin dropped the beat, the room changed. McRae and Michaels reacted the same way simultaneously: they wanted to go dance in a club, they wanted to feel hot. McRae later put it plainly: ‘We wanna get vulnerable and feel heartbroken. And then we heard this and we’re like, we wanna get nasty.’
The two of them wrote the song from start to finish in a single session, building out a metaphor that connected the feeling of love in a relationship to a sports car: sleek, fast, and entirely on display. The chorus arrived almost by accident, chased by that Pinterest scroll.
The whisper that kept coming out wrong
Once the concept was locked, the hardest technical problem was the vocal itself. McRae wanted a whisper that felt genuinely seductive, not aggressive. She ran take after take. ‘I sound too aggressive,’ she kept saying, or ‘I sound like I’m angry.’ Finding the right soft tone took far longer than the lyric writing. Ryan Tedder eventually pushed for harmonies on the second chorus, describing exactly what he wanted: harmonies that felt ‘Prince-y,’ that built tension without tipping into bright or happy territory.
Boutin spent equal time wrestling with the percussion underneath it all. Someone on TikTok described the finished track as having ‘a kitchen sink level of percussion,’ and Boutin confirmed that was earned: he layered toms across multiple passes, added an industrial loop, built a bass line he described as going ‘bah, bah,’ and then quietly recorded himself humming and folded those hums into the mix as well. The outro, which originally mirrored the intro exactly, went through countless revisions before Boutin began stacking layers and inserting small rhythmic breaks to create the emotional release McRae was looking for.
The final addition came late, after everyone thought the song was finished. McRae arrived at the studio and told Boutin she needed something to pick up the dance in the outro. The ‘Oh my guy, you don’t wanna waste my time’ section was written and dropped in as a bridge to the end. She also insisted, as she apparently always does, on a siren. Boutin said he was ‘always preparing to get asked for the siren.’
A version of herself she had not shown before
McRae has been releasing music publicly since she was 15. For much of that time, the songs were heartbreak songs written alone in her bedroom. ‘Sports Car’ represents something different: an artist who has spent a year turning 21 in public, processing her relationship with the media and with her own body, and deciding what version of herself she wants to put forward on her own terms.
The visual treatment extended that intention. Rather than placing a literal sports car in the visual for the song, McRae sat in a chair and watched 12 different versions of herself move through different looks and characters. She was the sports car. She was the thing on display, and she was also the one watching.
The siren Boutin already knew was coming
Somewhere in the final mix, buried under reversed audio pitched up an octave and a bass that took weeks to balance, a siren wails. Boutin had it queued up before McRae asked.
For an artist still figuring it out along the way, as McRae put it, ‘Sports Car’ arrived at exactly the right speed.
