Tate McRae got her start in showbiz as a champion competitive dancer, and even came in third on So You Think You Can Dance.  So how did she go from that to getting a record contract and scoring hits like “You Broke Me First?” Well, it all began that one day when she didn’t have anything to put on her YouTube channel.

“It originated as a dance channel…I was posting choreography,” Tate tells ABC Audio. “And then one day the footage got messed up and I was like, ‘Shoot!…I promised them I would post on Fridays! Let me just go in my bedroom.'”

“I was like, really mad, wrote this random song in 20 minutes and I was like, ‘Here we’re putting it online,'” she adds. “My family hated it. I hated it. We were just like, ‘O.K., put it out there.'”

But then something unexpected happened.

“It ended up going viral overnight and it was super weird,” says Tate. “So after it hit, like, 30 million views, I was like, ‘I should do this again!'”

She laughs, “So I kept on writing songs every week and signed with RCA [Records] and the transition slowly started to happen.”

Now, Tate says, she’ll hear from fans who like her music, but had no idea about her “other” talent.

“Sometimes I get people saying, ‘Oh, my gosh, you can dance too?’ and that’s so weird for me because I’ve been dancing since I was, like, six and that’s my thing,” she says.  “So, it’s very weird when a singing fan comes up to me and just doesn’t know that I’ve danced before.”  

“You Broke Me First” currently has over 500 million streams worldwide.

By Andrea Dresdale
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