Tate McRae sometimes imagines Michael Jackson standing beside her in the moments before a show. She described the habit in an interview about the anxiety that can accompany a tightly choreographed performance. At Lollapalooza in Chicago, one particular sequence gave her plenty to worry about: she would be covered in gold paint, and she felt she had only one chance to get it right.
As the moment at Lollapalooza got closer, Tate McRae was thinking about the number of chances she had to pull it off. There was one. Her August 2, 2026 performance in Chicago included a sequence in which her body was covered in gold paint. The effect would come and go within the show. Before it happened, she had time to think through all the ways it might fail.
She described the experience when talking about nerves and what happens to them once she starts to perform. From a place in a crowd, her shows look like the work of someone who knows where to be at each beat. The dancing is designed to be watched, and the voice has to continue through it. That can make the time right before she walks on look much calmer from the outside than it feels from where she is standing.
Sometimes, Tate McRae said, she imagines an artist such as Michael Jackson beside her. The image gives her something specific to bring to mind in a moment when the audience is still an abstraction. Jackson is someone she admires as a performer. Thinking about how he occupied a stage gives her attention somewhere to go while she is waiting for her own first move.
It makes sense that she would think of a singer whose dancing was inseparable from the way people experienced his records. Jackson could change a performance with a stop or a turn, then let the rhythm carry on around him. For someone who is about to sing and dance in front of a crowd, that is a concrete reference point. It is easy to picture a movement he made and the way it held an audience’s attention.
Tate McRae also described a change once a show is in progress. She can get absorbed enough to feel as though she has lost track of much of what is going on outside the performance. The way she remembers it, the more complete the absorption, the less room there is for the thoughts that crowded in before. Singing and dancing leave a series of immediate things to do. They get her from one part of the show to the next.
The gold paint involved a different kind of preparation. A dance can be rehearsed until the movements are familiar. An effect with a physical material still has to take place in the sequence in which the audience sees it. At Lollapalooza, she remembered thinking that she needed it to happen properly the first time. The worry was attached to that part of the performance as well as to the idea of walking out in front of the festival crowd.
In telling the story, Tate McRae referred to unwanted thoughts and to the possibilities she began to run through in her head. A crowd experiences those few minutes as a section of the show, which can look as inevitable as the song that introduces it. She remembered the uncertainty that was part of living through the same sequence from the other side, while there was still a chance that it could go differently from the rehearsal.
The conversation moved from performance to the way she thinks about intuition outside music. She described her mother as particularly intuitive and joked about both of them being witches. She also spoke about dreams and about the impressions she gets of other people. That was her account of how she makes sense of those experiences. The image she uses before a concert is more immediate: a person whose work she knows, placed beside her in her imagination.
At the time of the interview, Tate McRae was also preparing for the October 15 release of “Housewife.” A recording has its own timetable and can be returned to before anyone hears it. A festival performance runs at the speed of the event. She had played Chicago on August 2, more than two months before “Housewife” was due. The Chicago story offered a way to hear her talk about the work in that second setting, where a specific moment in a show is coming even if a performer would like more time to think it through.
The gap she describes is the brief one between knowing that she is about to perform and being able to get on with the performance. In that gap, she can still picture Jackson at her side. The crowd never has to see that part. What it sees is Tate McRae stepping into the movement she was waiting to begin.
