Tate McRae had one of the biggest break-out hits of last year with You Broke Me First – but she never intended to become a pop star.

From the age of six, she had trained as a dancer, attending Canada’s prestigious Alberta Ballet for 11 hours a day, filling her free time with competitions and galas.

She was so dedicated that she took lessons in rhythmic gymnastics with “super-intense Russian coaches” to improve her flexibility. It quickly paid off.

At the age of 11, she was awarded a two-week scholarship at the Berlin State Ballet after winning the silver medal at the 2015 Youth America Grand Prix – the world’s largest student ballet competition.

The following year she successfully auditioned for the US TV series So You Think You Can Dance, performing a stunning backwards walkover that prompted judge Paula Abdul to declare: “You are a gift from God.”

On the night her episode was broadcast, she watched the footage backstage at a Justin Bieber concert, where she’d been selected as a backing dancer for a one-off show in Canada.

This, she assumed, would be her life.

“I was kind of clueless,” says McRae. “I either wanted to be a backup dancer, or part of a contemporary dance company in Europe, but I was trying to keep my options open.”
Her musical career came about by chance. After So You Think You Can Dance, she’d set up a YouTube channel called Create With Tate to showcase her choreography. But in its fourth week, her camera failed and all her dance footage was lost. Determined not to skip a post, she decided to upload a song instead.

“Once I commit to something, I’m really gonna make sure it happens,” she says. “So I went into my room for 20 minutes, shut the door, wrote a song, came out, played it on a piano and posted it. I didn’t even know where it came from. It was an accident.”

That accident, a piano ballad called One Day, was subsequently viewed 36 million times.

In the video, McRae picks out the chords on a keyboard marked up with green stickers to show where her fingers should go – but the naivety of her technique is offset by the intimacy and emotion of her vocals.

Her lyrics, too, are strikingly perceptive for a 14-year-old, painting a splendid vignette of unrequited love: “It’s impossible to get you off my mind/I think about a hundred thoughts/And you are 99.”

As the views racked up, she decided to keep writing, even though she’d never studied music. To this day, she still starts songs by looking up chords on the music education website Chordify.

“I didn’t really realize how hard songwriting was because I would just get home from dance at 10 and write a song in half an hour,” she says.

“I just thought of it as this outlet at the end of the week, where I would let out all the feelings that I’d been keeping inside of me.”