Morgan Wallen, country’s biggest star and one of the biggest stars in the music world right now, has built his success on super-serving his audience, and his new album, I’m the Problem, is no different. The set, out today, has 37 tracks, besting its predecessor, 2023’s One Thing at a Time by one song and 2021’s Dangerous: The Double Album by seven tracks.
As on his past albums, Wallen is still looking for love in all the wrong places, with the majority of the songs serving as midtempo explorations on heartache, longing, co-dependence and missed chances, often while drowning his sorrows. When it comes to love, Wallen (or the songs’ protagonists) admits many of the wounds are self-inflicted and he just can’t get out of his own way.
His willingness to expose his vulnerability is one of the album’s top selling points, as is Wallen’s voice. He’s in fine shape here especially when his twang is matched with a Southern rock-leaning tune, such as on “Workin’ Man’s Song,” where he gives Travis Tritt a run for his money. Similarly, on songs like “I’m a Little Crazy” or “The Dealer,” where he’s examining broader issues than romance, he shows an appealing range.
When there are so many songs, it’s inevitable that some of them sound similar, and that’s not helped by too much reliance on a Roland TR-808 beat and a midtempo sway that renders some of the tracks virtually indistinguishable from each other. Putting out so many songs at once has proven a winning gambit for Wallen with his fans and with the charts, but this album could have lost at least 12 songs for a tighter, less repetitive sound.
Morgan Wallen ‘I’m The Problem’
Courtesy Photo
Wallen co-wrote 22 songs on the project, which, like his past projects, is helmed by producer Joie Moi, with help from Charlie Handsome and Jacob Durrett. He gets some help from his friends, some old — like Eric Church, Post Malone, HARDY and ERNEST — and some new, like Tate McRae.
The album’s success is a foregone conclusion, given that it’s already spawned three Country Airplay No. 1s with “Lies, Lies, Lies,” “Love Somebody” and “I’m the Problem,” and there seems to be no saturation point when it comes to his fans lapping up his songs.
There’s plenty to enjoy here. Below is an early take on our ranking of the songs on the highly anticipated set.
Wallen blends trap beats and processed backing vocals for a club-ready groove, as he interpolates a line from Keith Whitley’s 1986 hit “Miami, My Amy” into a familiar scene that Wallen has sung about before, of a country boy finding short-lived love in a coastal city. “What the hell is a redneck gone do/ In Miami,” he sings.
In this 44-second song fragment that comes early on in the album, Wallen blames a woman for all his woes and both of their inability to move apart. There’s a slow fade into what sounds like it would have made an interesting full song.
Funny how life comes back around in this song about a woman who vows to never, ever look back, but finds herself returning to Wallen’s arms after leaving his life and seemingly burning every bridge. And she’s back with surprising ardor. “Miss F.U.,” as Wallen calls her, has done a 180 turn in this lively tune and Wallen is equally confused, miffed and, perhaps secretly, delighted.
Heartbreak anthems continue to unspool on the album. “Nothin’ left at the end of this tunnel/ Just some lonely nights ahead,” he sings, his angst-fueled vocal augmented by pulsing keys, bass, drums and washes of guitars.
There’s a lot of states’ initials being thrown in in this tale about a girl who’s gotten the hell out of dodge in this undulating track about a man who has everything he needs in Tennessee, but the woman who’s left and not coming back. One of a long line of Wallen songs that combine his home state and lost love, like One Thing at a Time’s “Tennessee Numbers” or Dangerous’ “More Than My Hometown.”
He’s enamored with a Hollywood-area lady and is determined to use his small-town charm to win her over. “You’re way too pretty to be thinkin’ ‘bout sleep,” he sings, his pleas for late-night romance swathed in drums, keys, guitars and tambourines.
One of the album’s twangier tracks takes place over a weighty conversation while skinning a doe, so non-hunters may want to skip this one. But the bigger point is the friendship between the two characters and how in relationships, you want to be a friend “like Skoal always there in a pinch,” or Chevy and “steady like a rock” or a Browning and able to “shoot ‘em straight.” Let the product endorsements begin.
Another track reveling in a small-town living, this time Wallen and company tilt toward rap-inspired beats and choppy rhythms on this arena-ready track. Peppy and pride-fueled, this track is sure to a fan-favorite at Wallen’s shows.
The moody, acoustic-guitar driven title track, which became Wallen’s 17th No. 1 on Billboard’s Country Airplay chart, has him on the defensive as he admits he has issues. However, what he can’t reconcile is if he’s so damaged, why did the woman stay with him? “I guess I’m the problem/ And you’re Miss Never Do No Wrong/ If I’m so awful/ Then why’d you stick around this long?” he asks in this tale of destructive co-dependence.
Pop-centered electric guitar and ethereal flashes of mandolin heighten the sultry feel of this track, as Wallen sings about being helplessly entranced by a pair of “crazy eyes” and a lover who has the “Kinda love keep you up kinda like cocaine.”
Who among us hasn’t wondered at one time or another if we were missing something that kept us from being loved like everyone else? In this lilting waltz, Wallen knows that his woman knows how to find him and even how to find his mama’s house, but it’s to no avail because she can’t find the key component that will make her stay: “Anywhere you find me/ Yeah, I’ll be wishin’/ That I had the thing that seems to make most people stay.”
Wallen leans into blue-collar, hard-charging Southern Rock with aplomb on this anthem for the overworked and underpaid. Above careening electric guitars and relentless percussion, his muscular twang shines on lines such as “Lookin’ for my golden ticket/ Can’t find no silver lining.”
A big kick drum anchors this midtempo track about when the lights go down, who do you see behind your closed eyes? For Wallen, it’s his past love, and he’s betting she’s thinking about him too, no matter whose body is in her bed. The track is this album’s equivalent to One Thing at a Time’s “Thinkin’ Bout Me,” but not quite as compelling.
This song’s pulsing guitar sighing background vocals make for an enveloping canvas for Wallen’s warm vocal, as he sings of the bittersweet joy he has after seeing a lover smile for the camera, even though he knows her smile is counterfeit.
To a chugging backbeat similar to Springsteen’s “I’m On Fire,” Wallen finds relief after a breakup with a polarizing woman and can sleep again, even talk to his mama again. “I got better since you got gone,” he sings in this midtempo tune about how the world around him stayed the same, but he’s looking at it through a different lens since she’s out of his life.
This piano-driven track is about a despondent, heartbroken guy who’s made it to the bottom of many glasses of liquor but still hasn’t managed to drown out the pain — though he’s determined to keep trying. “What drinkin’ don’t erase all my damn mistakes, but I keep drinkin’ ‘til it does,” he sings
Toe-tapping tale that sounds like it’s ripped from the headlines of Wallen’s life as he sings about “kicked the bottle/kicked the bag/scratched the Broadway off the map.” He’s been talking to the doctor and the Lord, but the one thing he can’t escape from is himself as he confesses that to the outside world, it looks like he’s now doing great, but in his mind nothing has changed. Written by Wallen with a number of his go-tos, including Ernest and Ryan Vojtesak, the song feels confessional with a rapid-fire chorus that offers one of Wallen’s best vocal deliveries.
Wallen and Post Malone’s follow-up to their massive smash “I Had Some Help” is captivating, but the zippy tune can’t match that previous song’s infectious melody. Mileage will vary on the line “There’s a lot of reasons that I ain’t Jesus/ But the main one is I ain’t coming back,” which will strike some as clever and others as blasphemous, but certainly makes its point that the protagonist is pulling out of town on wings.
Eric Church and Morgan Wallen previously teamed up for the No. 1 Country Airplay hit “Man Made a Bar,” and on their new collab, they offer a reflection on teenage risk-taking, musing that fast cars and alcohol aren’t the best partners. Neither Church nor Wallen are writers on the track (it was penned by Rocky Block and Blake Pendergrass), but they put forth the message with believable, twangy wisdom.
Another No. 1 from I’m the Problem is a shimmering beauty that showcases Wallen’s vulnerable vocals as they play up against an acoustic guitar. He says he doesn’t miss her from the moment the sun comes up and that he’s over her, but it’s all lies because he’s still “a fool for you/nothing I wouldn’t do for you.”
When he catches an upper-class, “trust fund kid”-type guy laughing and eyeing his beat-up truck with derision, he fires back by detailing the joys and less-than-ideal realities of living his self-described “redneck life,” before declaring he hopes the guy questioning his small-town life returns one day as a redneck himself. Swirls of mandolin, acoustic and electric guitars brush the track with a twangy, rustic feel.
The story of a one-night stand is told through the filter of a pack of cigarettes in this smartly told tale, bolstered by an insinuating guitar line. The evening starts with 20 cigarettes as they meet in a bar on Demonbreun (points for getting one of Nashville’s most difficult street names in a song and rhyming it with “one.”) The night and the smoking progresses and culminates in a rendezvous in his truck bed as they share their last cigarette before she disappears like a whiff of smoke. A full movie in a three-minute song.
The relationship has run its course and he’s willing to take the direct route to end the relationship, even if he ends up initially looking like the villain. “We had a good run, it’s time to walk away,” he sings, with clean, shimmering production touches keeping his voice at the forefront of this midtempo track.
Written as a love letter to his 4-year-old son Indie, this sweet song is part apology, part life advice. It has to be strange knowing that his son will one day be able to Google his name, and as he sings in the song’s opening lines, “One day you’re gonna see my mugshot/ From a night when I got a little too drunk.” Looking ahead, he advises a future Indie to stay strong when things get tough and know that dad will always be there, even if he’s not wearing a cape.
Wallen reunites with longtime pal and fellow artist ERNEST on this track, which was written solely by Blake Pendergrass. This bright, midtempo track conveys a balmy feel, acknowledging the wooly, disappointing ways of the world, but keeping optimistic. Wallen takes the first verse, with ERNEST on the second and they trade off harmonies throughout. “I’m still sittin’ at the table makin’ bets/ Bettin’ that some better times are comin’ up ahead,” ERN sings. This reassuring track marks one of the album’s most auspicious.
In this shimmery tune with a slight hip-hop beat (and Wallen’s first duet with a female artist), Wallen and McRae are both coming into the evening with tarnished hearts and a willingness to be whatever the other person needs them to be…or not. They trade verses and a few harmonies, but it would have been fun to hear them sing together more as their very identifiable voices are a surprisingly compatible match.
Wallen returns to his penchant for emotionally broken themes here. Tightly-woven harmonies lend urgency, while steady yet understated percussion echoes the heavy-hearted lyrics, as Wallen sings of aiming to “see how faded I can get by sunrise.”
There are a staggering 11 songwriters credited on the song, thanks to the interpolation of 2018’s “Tokyo Nights” by Digital Farm Animals, Shaun Frank, and Dragonette, which will sound familiar to fans of Dua Lipa’s “Training Season,” which interpolates the same song (where’s the mash-up of all three songs?). The brisk melody plays again Wallen’s feelings of loneliness and emptiness even when his lover is by his side. “I’ll be lucky if I ever find somethin’ more than a crazy night.”
Though much of the album centers around whiskey-fueled, post-heartbreak solace, here he offers up a sensual account of longing and desire for someone who’s already taken. “In another life…what would it be like if you were mine?” he ponders, his vocal reaching smooth tenor tones as he conjures up notions of what that alternate reality would entail.
Wallen has regrets in this beautifully rendered gentle ballad about walking away from a relationship. ”Swore I could live without you, but I’d die to have you back tonight,” he sings. In an album full of vulnerability and pain, “Falling Apart” is like an open self-inflicted wound as the protagonist is in free fall over a lesson he’s learned too late.
Wallen leans more into the country space here, on this self-reflective take that finds him singing about how a long-held penchant for liquor led to a lover’s exit, and how he wishes he could “drink whiskey in reverse,” rewinding all of the destructive consequences. Wallen wrote the track with HARDY, ERNEST and Ryan Vojtesak.
Wallen takes on original sin in this clever up-tempo banger about temptation and his utter inability to resist. “Heard the snake on the shoulder give me the go-ahead,” he sings. The devil has Wallen’s number and he’s calling daily. The sprightly melody is in sharp contrast to the dark lyrics as he fights the devil: “He knew what I’d battle, he knew what would tempt me/He threw out the apple, said let there be women and let there be whiskey.”
The song’s protagonist is caught between the pull of copious amounts of alcohol and longing for a simpler time with a better connection to a higher power. “I’ve been goin’ too hard I slid pretty far/ Yeah, Mama and Heaven both know,” Wallen sings. The song’s lyrics acknowledge the greater responsibility that’s carried as a son and father, but also one’s own longing for peace and maturity.
This gripping, stark ballad details a young love that goes awry. Life on the road and old-fashioned cheating tear this couple apart, with disastrous consequences. “Heartbreak kills, Jill got on the pills/ and Jack couldn’t get off of that Crown,” Wallen sings. Lyrically one of the strongest tracks on the album, “Jack and Jill” was written by Ned Cameron, Jacob Hackworth and Jared Mullins.
The heart wants what it wants and, in this case, Wallen’s wants someone who is no longer there. On this bittersweet, swaying,midtempo tune, Wallen has moved on after a breakup, but he’s hedging his bets. He gets close to the women who are occupying his hours and his bed — but not too close — just in case the one he loves has a change of heart and comes back.
He’s filled with bitter anger and intent on revenge. Precise, crashing trap beats add to his fury as his spit-fire vocal drips with resentment as he sends a message to an ex that he’s (supposedly?) moved on and “can’t wait to put you through the hell that you put me through” by parading his new lover in front of said ex.
A gorgeous country track that stands out from the slew of love-gone-wrong songs on the album with lyrics that feel like poetry and capture these times. It’s the perfect album closer. The protagonist is a bootlegger selling his illegal goods to people trying to numb their pain, but he’s in just as much pain as the rest of them. “I’m screaming at a TV that ain’t got ears/On anti-depressants and lukewarm beers/And I do it every night but the news don’t change,” he sings as he embraces his own craziness in a world that’s insane. Stripped down and moving. Wallen didn’t write it, but he owns it. This is what happens when a Wallen world-weary vocal meets a world-class song.