The Wild Story Of How Morgan Wallen Ended Up in Drake's ‘You Broke My Heart’ Music Video

One of the leading managers in Nashville, Troy ‘Tracker’ Johnson, has appeared on the In The Trenches With Spidey podcast, hosted by renowned photographer Spidey Smith, to delve into his time working with Florida Georgia Line, Morgan Wallen and HARDY.

Partway through the conversation, Spidey - who produced the album covers for all three of Morgan Wallen's studio albums - asked Tracker to explain how Wallen ended up starring in Drake's ‘You Broke My Heart’ music video back in December 2023.

The visuals for Drake's For All The Dogs (Scary Hours Edition) stand-out open with the Toronto rapper enjoying dinner and cocktails with Wallen, before the two wander outside the restaurant and clamber into a sports car. As the vehicle drives down the road, it suddenly explodes, before two TikTok dancers, Grace Matthews and Taylor Morris - who play Drake and Wallen's exes - lip-sync the entirety of the song.

When the music video dropped, it sent shockwaves throughout the country music world, with Morgan Wallen's appearance in the visuals with Drake consolidating the Sneedville singer-songwriter's emergence as one of the biggest artists on the planet. It capped of a blockbuster year, during which Wallen scored a slew of accolades and earned a 16-week No. 1 with his beat-driven anthem, ‘Last Night’.

When delving into how Morgan Wallen and Drake's unexpected link-up came together, Tracker recalled the bizarre experience began when he returned from his honeymoon, to find Seth England - Big Loud's CEO - asking if he could jump on a flight to Miami the next day, to have lunch with Jimmy Iovine and Dr Dre. The duo wanted HARDY to record a country version of Dre and Snoop Dogg's iconic 1994 track, ‘Gin & Juice’, which the Mississippi native released in April of this year.

A month after this meeting with two rap titans, Tracker got word that Drake's team were trying to get in touch with him, “I get a text from Tracy [Martin, President of The Core Entertainment] that says that Drake's manager is going to be calling you. This is probably at 10:30, 11 ‘o’ clock at night, and I'm going, ‘I'm sorry, what?’”

Tracker expanded, “So I'm sitting there, and I get a call. I answer it and he just says, ‘Hey man, Drake would like to fly Morgan to Toronto tomorrow to be in his video. That's all the information I have, and I'm like, ‘Oh, okay...’ At 11 ‘o’ clock at night, it's really hard to get a hold of Morgan Wallen. It's hard to get a hold of him at 8am, noon, 2pm, 5pm”.

He stressed that the specifics were kept under wraps throughout, “I was like, ‘Man, any more details?’ And he goes, ‘No, I can get a plane there, it's going to take off from Nashville, it's going to fly to Toronto. I don't have a location’. At the time, he didn't even say the song. [Drake's] shooting a video, and he wants Morgan to be in the video. Is he performing the song? Don't know. We don't know anything...”

Tracker joked that, although Morgan Wallen is notoriously difficult to get in touch with, when Drake is involved, he doesn't hesitate, “I text Morgan, and then he calls me back [immediately]...I mean, [it's] Drake. If I need to get a hold of Morgan I'm going to say, ’Hey, Drake has a question for you’...They've got each other's numbers now”.

With Morgan Wallen and Drake crooning a snippet of what appears to be an unreleased song, possibly titled ‘I'm Glad She's Gone’, near the start of the music video, fans have been wondering whether an in-studio collaboration could be on the cards. The fact that Wallen and Drake have each other's numbers will no doubt excite listeners that are still holding out hope for a game-changing duet.

Tracker went on, “[Morgan] calls me and I'm like, ‘Man, I don't know. This is what I got for you. Drake would like to fly us’, and he's like, ‘What do you think we should do?’ and I was like, ‘I think the answer is, ‘Yeah. What time? What time do we need to be awake and at the airport?’ I think this is an opportunity you cannot pass up...Then his manager texts me a few more details. I connected someone with Cody, who was Morgan's right hand, and that conversation started. Even the next morning we wake up and we're not 100% sure what we're doing”.

Incredibly, Morgan Wallen and his entourage still weren't certain at this point where the shoot was taking place, “We don't know where we're going. We get a telephone number. They were keeping it kind of hush...They didn't want a lot of people to know where the location was. But a lot of it was also being thrown together last minute”.

“So we wake up the next morning”, Tracker proceeded, “At this point, we get to the plane. We still have no idea where we're going, other than Toronto...It's [Drake's] plane - not his famous [Air Drake] plane, but still a pretty nice plane! Morgan is in a great mood, we're all having a good time...We're told that when we land in Toronto, the drivers will know where we're going. We land, and we bring Amy [Georgulis, Morgan Wallen's Image Consultant], we bring some outfits...‘Be himself’ is what they said...We knew he was not performing, he would just be in the video”.

Tracker went on to highlight how, when they arrived in Toronto, Wallen and the team started having doubts as to whether this was real, “So we land, we get into the SUVs, Cody leans over - security was with us - and asks, and the driver goes, ‘I don't know where we're going. We thought you'd know where we're going’. So now we're sitting on the tarmac, and everyone's blowing up everyone...then it's finally like, ‘Okay, yeah. Here's the location’. So we all pull the location up, and it's just in the middle of nowhere, and it doesn't really look like anything. It looks like a field, and at this point we're all thinking, ‘Are we getting punked? Did someone just spend a lot of money to fly us to Toronto to catfish us?’...I had vetted them and Tracy was like, ‘No, no, this is his manager’. So I was like, ‘I don't think so, I think we're in a good spot’. So we just get in the car, and we trust the process”.

Even now, Drake's team were keeping them in the dark about a lot of the details, “We really don't know much more than he's gonna be in a video, and we drive and start to get a little more information as we're going, and ‘Oh here's a production assistant that's on-site, and they're going to meet you and take you to your trailer’. Things start to slowly roll in. We pull up and it's just this gated, really dark road, and we start driving, and at this point we're also going, ‘Okay, now we're back to being murdered. I don't know what's going on!’ Then we pull around this corner, and it's a full-blown movie set. You know that little town square in Universal Studios where everyone shoots? It looked like that. There was a town square, and there were restaurants and there were all these things - all fake”.

Tracker warmly reflected on the moment they all met Drake, “We pull up and they're just like, ’Mr Wallen, there's your trailer...and we go sit in this trailer. The door opens up, and I'm walking out, and Drake is walking in. There are a lot of people I've met in my life, but there are people like Drake that might throw you back a little bit. The door opens, he looks up at me and goes, ‘Hey, what's up, man?’ I was like, ‘Oh, hello, Mr Drake’. He walks in and hangs out with Morgan for 15, 20 minutes, and then walks off. It was such a cool moment. We'd finally gotten to the point - we're there, they have talked, he is real, it is real, everything is real”.

Endearingly, Tracker outlined how Morgan Wallen and Drake really hit it off from the start, “There's now a little script coming together...Drake and Morgan started to have a really good time, and the video just kept going and going - they did this scene, I don't know, fifty times. In the scene there are cocktails, it was a good time”.

Track laughed as he remembered checking with Drake's team about his outfit, “One of the funniest moments in that story is, I walked off to ask Drake's stylist what he was going to be wearing. I was like, ‘Hey, excuse me, so here's a photo of Morgan, this is what he's wearing. What is Drake going to be wearing?’ And she goes, ‘Oh, Drake just tells us what he's wearing’...I was like, ‘Makes sense. Yeah, fair enough...!”

The celebration continued long into the night following the conclusion of the shoot, with Troy ‘Tracker’ Johnson recollecting how two of Morgan Wallen's go-to collaborators and buddies, ERNEST and Charlie Handsome, were both out in Toronto with them.

Shortly after the ‘You Broke My Heart’ visuals had been filmed, the entourage went for a lavish dinner, “Our flight kept getting pushed back, so now it's like, ‘Oh we're gonna leave at midnight, oh we're gonna leave at 1:00am, oh we're gonna leave at 2:00am...so Drake just sends us to a restaurant, a very nice restaurant...Ern's with us, Charlie Handsome's with us and we sit there ‘til 3 in the morning eating, feasting, having cocktails, and then we're just on this plane and arrive back at 4 or 5 in the morning...I remember getting home and looking at Brittani, my wife, and I was like, ‘I have no idea what just happened’”. 24 hours ago I got a phone call, we flew to Toronto...Drake and I talked about Texas, he bought a place down there, I'm like, ’Am I now friends with Drake? What's going on here?”

With Morgan Wallen increasingly infusing rap and trap-leaning textures into his innovative country sound, exemplified by the likes of ‘180 (Lifestyle)’ and ‘WHISKEY WHISKEY’ with Moneybagg Yo, we're still keeping our fingers crossed that the 2024 CMA Entertainer of the Year has a collaboration with Drake lined up on the horizon.

Drake has previously admitted he has a soft spot for the genre, with the October's Very Own figurehead dropping a couple of thinly veiled references to George Strait, for instance, on ‘Blessings’ with Big Sean and ‘HYFR’. Wallen confirmed in a 2023 interview that he'd sent a song to an unnamed artist outside of country music, revealing, “The answer was bittersweet. It was, ‘Holy shit, this sounds like a global No. 1 record, but I just can’t do it right now’”. Could this have been Drake, and if so, maybe they've had a chance to figure out the timing since then?

Morgan Wallen attended Drake's show with Lil Durk at Nashville's Bridgestone Arena back in February, and Drake has been sharing photos of him donning Western-inspired attire of late, so perhaps a seismic joint track with Wallen is closer than we think.

Or maybe, Wallen and Drake's text-chain has nothing to do with collaborating, and they simply send each other hilarious GIFs and memes - but we'll keep manifesting it regardless.

To watch Spidey Smith's full interview with Troy ‘Tracker’ Johnson for In The Trenches With Spidey, see below:

For more on Morgan Wallen, see below: