Tate McRae needs God

On “Dear God,” my favorite song on Tate McRae’s divine third album, 'So Close To What,' and its biggest sin: not having an ex-evangelical around to punch it up.

In the beginning Tate McRae created her third studio album So Close To What. And Tate McRae’s third studio album So Close To What was good. The 21 year-old Canadian artist slaloms across sixteen shimmeringly and brusquely dancy pop tracks that shimmy the same slope as 2023’s Think Later. And the best of the new songs, for my money, is the sound-the-alarm, get-your-ass-on-the-dance-floor fourth track, “Dear God.”

“Dear God” is a certified car-swerver. A glitzy ethereal siren’s call wafts over rattly drums smuggled underground from the 2000s, Timbaland thudding the walls from the next club over. McRae sings and sneers, alternatingly Canada-cold and so earnest she might be lying prostrate in the booth. It’s an automatic dance floor number and a chorus you can scream out the window — a biting breakup anthem, a slutty hookup hymn, and an ode to love lost, all at once! Verily I say unto you: can go ahead and carve this one into the stone tablets of my 2025 Spotify Wrapped.

Now that the celestial engravers are at work, I must profess my biggest qualm with the best song on Tate McRae’s third studio album, So Close To What: no one who wrote this song grew up in church and it shows.

“Dear God” should be a flirtily irreverent quasi-religious banger. It should wink and beg and pray and praise. The sacred and the sacrilege writhing sweatily together on the dance floor. It should literally be this generation’s “Like A Prayer.” Pop music sainthood was right there at Tate McRae’s fingertips!

Instead, “Dear God” is meek, rushed-baptism bop. A lukewarm warmed-up jam capable of carnality but not conversion. McRae’s narrator is, ostensibly, praying to God for help getting over a guy. And that is…the entire concept of the song! It’s a testament to McRae’s muscular alto-swoops and bratty-snapped lines that the song rises and walks the way it does. It’s great — and full of so much untapped possibility. She could’ve turned water to wine, but instead, she just gave us really great bottled water. Mountain Valley! The good stuff. But in doing so, she left such deep metaphorical-religious waters un-waded. They needed a kid who grew up in church to write this song!

The first verse just sounds like sinning. McRae’s breathy gasps slither around the room. The listener has the distinct sense that Tate is contemplating something for which she’ll have to confess later. Without much to work with, it’s McRae’s performance that transcends. It’s all about how she enunciates those hissed Garden of Eden s’s, the way she pronounces the second syllable of “same air” like she’s already ascended to Heaven, leaving us mortals behind. She has to transcend, because the lyrics are vapid, vanity, dust of the earth – some Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul tableaus of my-first-poem mediocrity. “Back of my mind / He stay there, pops up time to time / like, “Hey there.” McRae’s star power alone gets us through the first verse, at the end of which she finally delivers the image the song’s title prophesies: her, on her knees, hands clasped in prayer.

McRae directs the chorus to God. “Dear God,” she begins, and it is here that a kid who grew up in Sunday School or with whole swaths of The Prince of Egypt soundtrack committed to memory could really have done the track some good, because when she continues, she asks God to “take his kiss right out of my brain.” This, thematically-speaking, falls short of the glory of God. I do suppose McRae and her team of writers – the artist Julia Michaels and co-producers Ryan Tedder and Grant – get credit for borrowing the phrasal verb “take away” from Scripture. Whereas Jesus asks his Father to “take this cup from me,” McRae’s narrator asks Him to “take the pleasure outta my pain.” Hard-hitting stuff!

Jesus told his disciples to pray in secret, but McRae brays, falsetto skipping over the irresistible beat. The psalmist begs God to blot out his iniquities, but McRae has simpler requests: take his imprint out of her bed, “amazing” out of their sex. Why have Tate McRae’s writers forsaken her?

I will say, if the first part of the chorus is the Old Testament – all sackcloth and ashes – the second part is the New Testament. This is the good part! Joy springs eternal! McRae resurrects her lithe alto, which water-walks across the stormy beat. And the best, most shake-your-tambourines part of the song ends up boasting the best reference, too: citing her “no-good thoughts,” McRae adds that she’d like to pray about that as well.

This is, more or less, the song. The second verse, bridge, and outro might as well be the apocrypha, scrawled on ancient scrolls and tossed into some ever-dark cave – a cave that might well just turn into a club, where millennia later, this song might just blast.

I’d like to reiterate: this song is awesome.

And it feels like a huge missed opportunity.

Let’s take Madonna. “Like A Prayer” is so unbelievably on the nose. (Update: just re-listening and -reading the lyrics. It is capital-V very on the capital-N Nose! She really went for it!) A church organ blares. We have angels sighing and choirs singing, no end and no beginning, Madonna crooning in worship. The object of Madonna’s praise is a click removed, a mystery, which cranks up the power of the innuendos – “feel your power,” “you’re in control” – to biblical proportions.

And, like, I get it: she’s Madonna. I’m not asking McRae to pen one of the greatest songs of all time. But if you’re going to invoke the Divine, you’ve gotta go there. To invoke Madonna, you’ve got to take us there. To call the song “Dear God,” and not attempt a possibly-blasphemous eternity-spanning double entendre that would make Madonna blush — what are you even doing?

Thus, I have a few thematically-rich ideas for the remix:

• Toss in a tambourine or an organ. Maybe a gospel choir? A Katy Perry guest verse? Knock yourself out!

• Compare yourself to a biblical character. The Virgin Mary is right there. Paul, or maybe Job? He was visited my catastrophes seemingly greater than yours, but his prayers have similar echoes.

• Sprinkle in more religious allusions. By my count, we’re currently at three. This number should be at least forty-seven. Forty-seven religious allusions. Take the first verse: “we still breathe the same air?” There’s gotta be a way for you to end that line on “sinner.” I believe in you!

Look, ultimately, I blame McRae’s producer and co-writer, Ryan Tedder. Tedder grew up in a family of pastors! He was so entrenched in Christian music that he had to do that thing where he said he wasn’t in a Christian band, he was a Christian in a band! How could Tedder possibly let this happen? It’s unforgivable. Pray about that, Ryan.

I’d like to make two things clear: the song “Dear God” by Tate McRae is an absolute moment-marking, dance-demanding banger. And the next time a pop star writes a song about God and Madonna isn’t available for the co-write: here am I. Send me!