Morgan Wallen review – country's biggest star sings of whiskey, heartbreak … and more whiskey
Morgan Wallen's world domination continues apace. The country singer's last two albums spent 29 weeks at the top of the US chart. This week his latest, fourth offering, I'm the Problem, had the biggest opening week of the year so far in the US as well as going straight in at No 1 in the UK.
This prodigious achievement may owe a little to a canny release strategy: streaming metrics mean that longer albums often chart higher, and I'm the Problem weighs in at a staggering 37 tracks. Equally, all 37 are in the US singles chart this week, setting a new record – Wallen is a commercial phenomenon, the biggest country star to cross over to mainstream success since Taylor Swift.
Like Swift, Wallen's tours have graduated from arenas to stadiums, which makes this rare intimate album-launch show a spectacularly hot ticket. The preshow queue, in which Stetsons and cowboy boots figure large, stretches way down Chalk Farm Road in north London: 'I hear 300,000 people tried to get tickets for tonight,' marvels Wallen.
Yet it is hard to see why there is quite that level of fuss. Not even Wallen's fiercest defenders would claim he is remotely groundbreaking. A laid-back, mustachioed, regular guy possessed of an easy-going charm, he simply perches on a bar stool and plays smooth, well-crafted country and western powered by earworm melodies.
His six-piece band are slick and his lyrical themes are repetitive. Wallen sings about drinking to forget women who leave him because he drinks. He bids these escapers from his serial doomed relationships a self-pitying, passive-aggressive adieu: 'If I'm the problem, you might be the reason.' Then he drinks some more, and longs for their return.
These laments have the ring of authenticity. Wallen's appeal rests largely in him being a flawed everyman figure (with two recent court convictions for public intoxication). The maudlin Superman finds him sighing that his toddler son will one day learn of his dad's transgressions: 'That bottle's my kryptonite, brings a man of steel down to his knees.' It's hokum, but oddly moving.
Love Somebody has a melody as exquisite as Fleetwood Mac at their most swooning as Wallen craves a romance 'stronger than the whiskey'. The witty wordplay inherent in all the best country is present and correct: Whiskey Glasses begins, 'Poor me… pour me another drink.' And then Wallen takes his leave and ambles off to notch up a million more streams.
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Soon after receiving my results, I was contacted by Kevin, a sixtysomething from Texas who ventured that I might be his close genetic relative. A second surprise email arrived, this time from Beverly, a 69-year-old based in knew she had been adopted in Dorchester in 1955 and that I was her close relative; either her first cousin or half-niece. 'I wonder if the family knows about me …' she wrote, searchingly. Thus began a quest that led to the discovery my father's father was not, as I'd believed, a mild-mannered Brummie butcher named Sidney (I grew up in Birmingham), but a brewery worker from Dorset who had fathered at least ten children in his colourful life. These children included my dad, Ken, and Beverly, who was adopted. After we followed the DNA trail to its only plausible conclusion, Kevin, Bernard's nephew, wrote: 'Bernard was charming, but I'm afraid was a known rogue.' I planned my trip from my home in Lewes, East Sussex, to Bernard's home town, Dorchester, with the help of genealogists from AncestryPro, professional genealogy arm. As far as surprise ancestral homes go, I had struck lucky. The Dorset market town retains many of the features of Bernard's day, from the grassy adumbrations of the old Roman amphitheatre at Maumbury Rings, where I enjoyed a spectral sunrise jog, to the High Street's lofty Georgian townhouses (many still going by their Victorian names), and the red-brick muscularity of the Eldridge Pope brewery, where census records located Bernard working as a cashier totting up the sales of its 'celebrated strong ales' in 1939. These days the site is a glossy Dorchester restaurant and shopping district, Brewery Square, and the old 'bonded store' where Bernard dispatched brews on the train to London has been reborn as an industrial-chic tapas and cocktail joint. The genealogist Simon Pearce says the UK makes for rich rewards for DNA sleuths. 'There's plenty left to see: cemeteries, churches your ancestors attended, former homes that are still standing.' Pearce has a special interest in family history during the wars and says that as far as DNA big reveals go, my story is run-of-the-mill. 'The Second World War saw young people called up and sent across the country and to the other side of the world,' he says. 'It also brought well-dressed American and Canadian servicemen to the UK at the same time as life was unpredictable and people, rightly, feared they might die tomorrow.' Little wonder, then, that shock parenting events, as well as divorces, spiked in the 1940s. • Read our full guide to Dorset I'm staying at the King's Arms, a Georgian coaching inn that was recently renovated by the boutique hotel group Stay Original. The group's managing director, Rob Greacen, gives me a tour of the hotel's unearthed original features: the 17th-century posts that led to the inn's stables, a 16th-century inner room and a 1950 restaurant menu that was discovered tucked in a wall cavity and is now framed in the hotel's smart, American-style bar. The menu advertises steamed chicken with mushroom sauce and boiled potatoes with a choice of fruit jelly or sprats on toast for dessert, which Greacen agrees doesn't sound like the sort of fare to put lead in a philanderer's pencil. These days the King's Arms is a more toothsome proposition, with gourmet à la carte breakfasts including local smoked trout omelette Arnold Bennett and, in its smarter double rooms, freestanding bathtubs commanding the old Georgian bay windows. The next morning I stroll around Victorian Borough Gardens, where, in Bernard's day, brass bands would have blasted out rousing tunes from an ornate painted bandstand. Then I head on to the Shire Hall Museum, a preserved Georgian courtroom and jail that's now a tribute to the lowly souls who passed through its notorious docks, from the Tolpuddle Martyrs to children imprisoned for infractions such as stealing vegetables. It stands as a timely reminder, not to romanticise the routinely hard-knock lives of those who went before us. • 19 of the best UK pubs with rooms Back in the King's Arms, a smoking room occupies the spot where wagon wheels and horses' hoofs would have clattered through the gates of this ancient wayfarers inn. I dine here on crispy Dorset coast fish, a dish Bernard might have recognised, although the wild garlic aïoli and samphire might have confused a 1940s lad (mains from £18). Time moves on, and lemon posset with pumpkin seed biscotti finds favour over fried sprats for pud. After a week on the DNA trail, I think I've cleared up the mystery of how Virginia and Bernard met, with local records showing Bernard's family link to generations of sailors who lived between Weymouth and Sennen Cove, a few miles from Virginia's native Pendeen. I'll never know the full truth about Bernard and Virginia's rendezvous, though I feel this mission has given me a fresh appreciation of our emotionally open — and gastronomically improved — modern times. I also have a sense of my secret grandfather's life from the houses, streets and pubs he passed through. Here's to you, Grandad, you old rogue. This article contains affiliate links, which can earn us revenue Sally Howard was a guest of Discover Dorchester ( and the King's Arms, which has room-only doubles from £150 a night ( Curated DNA heritage tours from Ancestry Pro and Kensington Tours start from £276 (
