To say Morgan Wallen has had a monster year would be an understatement.
Dangerous: The Double Album finished last year as the top-selling album of 2021 – in any genre. It was the first country album to ever spend its first 10 weeks at number one on the charts, and also recently broke the record held by Taylor Swift for most weeks in the Billboard top 10.
And just this month, Dangerous won Album of the Year at the 2022 ACM Awards.
Morgan’s also currently on a headlining arena tour, and last week he played three straight sold-out shows at Nashville’s Bridgestone Arena.
But it’s hard to forget what was going on with Morgan this time a year ago.
In February 2021, the video came out showing Morgan using a racial slur, and he was subsequently pulled from radio, suspended by his label, and banned from awards shows.
But it was also around this time last year that another artist reached out to Morgan wanting to collaborate: Chicago-based rapper Lil Durk.
In December of 2021, Morgan and Durk dropped a surprise collaboration that set the internet, TikTok, and pretty much the whole music world on fire with “Broadway Girls.”
Lil Durk was recently on The Full Send Podcast, and discussed how the collab with one of country’s hottest names right now came about:
“Last year I had dropped my album, it was called The Voice. In my eyes, I’m like, ‘Ain’t nobody else dropping, we’re going number one. I’m celebrating early.’
Then they called, like, ‘You’re number two.’ So I’m like, ‘Who’s number one?’ He dropped the same day I dropped, and he was number one for ten weeks.
So I DM’d him, I’m like ‘Man, we gotta do something, just lock it in.’ And we was choppin’ it up and he was telling me, like, ‘We got the little situation going on.’ He was like, ‘When it’s the right time.’
And I just reached back out to him, like ‘Let’s just do it.’ I hung out with him, I just felt the vibe, felt the genuine love from him. Like, nah, you just made a mistake, you’re not a racist.”
Durk said that he hadn’t seen the racial slur video when he first reached out to Morgan, but that Morgan was upfront about it and told him what happened from the beginning:
“I just asked him like, ‘Shit, how do you really feel? Like, do you really feel like that?’ I’m like ‘You can just tell me the truth.’
And he really just broke it down to me like, drunk mistake, everybody makes mistakes. Then when I went to go hang out with him I felt the love from him, like the vibe from him, and I was just telling him ‘The world’s gonna make you seem like somebody you ain’t anyway.’”
Durk also said that he didn’t believe that Morgan was racist, and that he wouldn’t have done the collaboration with him if he did:
“If I feel he was a racist, I would have never did it anyway.”
Speaking on how “Broadway Girls” ultimately came about, Durk said that he first heard the song when Morgan posted the first verse and chorus on his Instagram – and Durk knew that he wanted to be a part of that one.
But there were people who tried to talk him out of it.
“Everybody was against it. They’re like ‘Hell no, they’re gonna cancel you.’ I was like ‘I’m gonna take my chances with it.’ As long as I know that I rock with him, that he ain’t no racist, I’m gonna do what I wanna do.”
It was a gamble that seems to have paid off, with the song quickly becoming a fan-favorite and already racking up over 63 million streams on Spotify in just over 3 months.
Lil Durk and Morgan have also performed the song live together a few times, including during Durk’s performance at MLK Freedom Fest in Nashville, and again on the last night of Morgan’s recent sold-out run at Bridgestone Arena.
And of course the music video: