On Saturday night, Morgan Wallen lit a cigar before going on stage in Charlotte, North Carolina for the 87th and final show of his One Night at a Time world tour. For the last two years, the 31-year-old country musician has traveled the world with a life-sized replica of his grandmother’s small-town Tennessee front porch as a set in his stadium show, a reference to the cover of his third album, One Thing at a Time. On the tour’s debut night, March 15, 2023, in Auckland, New Zealand, Wallen was a genre favorite whose crossover to pop wasn’t assured. He’s since become one of the US’s biggest music stars and one of Nashville’s best bets, recently smashing his own record for history’s highest-grossing country tour.
Now, Wallen is planning for what’s next. Last week, he released his first new single, “Love Somebody” and announced the Sand in My Boots festival, in partnership with concert promoter AEG, scheduled to run May 16–18 in Gulf Shores, Alabama. Naturally, the three-day festival will include sets from his friends and collaborators Post Malone, Ernest Keith Smith, who performs as ERNEST, and Michael Hardy, better known as HARDY, and other big names in country music, including Brooks & Dunn, Bailey Zimmerman, and Chase Rice. But Wallen also handpicked performers from beyond his original music scene, with rapper Wiz Khalifa joining Three 6 Mafia, T-Pain, 2 Chainz, and Moneybagg Yo, and indie-rock band the War on Drugs—one of Wallen’s longtime favorite acts—headlining a list of bands that includes Future Islands, Real Estate, and Wild Nothing.
Working with Wallen on the festival has been “a dream come true,” said Stacy Vee, vice president of festival booking for Goldenvoice, the production company behind the Coachella and Stagecoach festivals. She added that the lineup is “one of the most eclectic and electric” experiences she’s put on.
The festival is the bow on a few years of Wallen’s rapid rise to pop stardom. “There’s no way when they signed Morgan that they were like, he’s going to be the one, he’s going to be the next Taylor Swift–type person in the genre,” Hardy told VF. He acknowledged Wallen’s talent as a singer and songwriter, but compared the total package to a small-town entrepreneur with the Midas touch. “I knew a guy from my hometown, he’s a business owner, and everything he touched turned to gold. He was a hard worker and a really smart guy, but some of it was just pure luck.”
Wallen’s current industry stature is a far cry from where it was in February 2021, when the artist and his longtime label, Big Loud, came to a fork in the road. They had the number-one album in the nation, a few songs banked for a follow-up, and a raging controversy after TMZ published a video of Wallen saying a racial slur to a friend in his driveway. Condemnation from inside and outside of Nashville was swift. His music was pulled from the biggest radio stations, Spotify removed promotion of his recent release, Dangerous: The Double Album, from its playlist, and other popular musicians, including Maren Morris, Jason Isbell, and Kelsea Ballerini, spoke out against Wallen. The singer had to prove he either wanted to be an entertainer for all, or embrace the “canceled” label and consign himself to the worst type of second act.
He made his choice quickly, and it seemed like an easy one. After filming a hangdog apology video, he went to a San Diego rehab facility for a 30-day stay to address his relationship with alcohol. He even told his fans that they shouldn’t be supporting him. “I was never that guy that people were portraying me to be,” Wallen said in an interview with Billboard in December 2023 regarding the video. “If I was that guy, then I wouldn’t have cared. I wouldn’t have apologized. I wouldn’t have done any of that if I really was that guy that people were saying about me.”
Curiously, or not, the album stayed affixed to the top of the charts for over a year. Had the scandal actually helped his career? Fearful that it had, Wallen and his team did some back-of-the-envelope math and settled on $500,000 as the rough value of all the press he’d received, however negative, and promised it to Black-serving organizations, including the Black Music Action Coalition. And then, Wallen was left in an odd place—too popular to be ignored but seemingly too toxic to remain mainstream.
