Colter Wall, who first caught the attention of traditional country fans with his 2017 self-titled album and rough-hewn songs like “Kate McCannon” and “Motorcycle,” has canceled his 2026 tour, citing the need to take care of his mental health.
The singer-songwriter from Saskatchewan, Canada, shared the news with fans in a post on social media on Wednesday morning.
“The truth is that I am mentally unwell,” Wall wrote in part. “Despite this, I have pushed myself to continue with touring. As a result my mental health has only further declined.”
Wall said that, after discussing the matter with his team, he is scrapping the rest of his 2026 tour in support of his album Memories and Empties. “We have decided to cancel the remaining shows and take an indefinite hiatus from live music,” he wrote. “Thank you for your understanding and support.”
In a 2017 interview with Rolling Stone that focused on his self-titled album, Wall talked about the intersection between country music and folk. “I call myself a folksinger, so it should be stripped down and not a lot of production,” he said. “The mission statement going in was less is more. This is a record about stories and about songwriting.”
Wall’s decision to prioritize his mental health over the road isn’t uncommon in the country music sphere. Artists from Ella Langley and Hardy to Wyatt Flores have all been forthright with fans about the emotional and mental toll that touring takes on a performer.“My dreams were coming true so fast, I didn’t even have time to think about them,” Flores told Rolling Stone in a 2024 feature. “I’d just wonder, ‘Why was I even dreaming about that?’ and that’s a bad mindset to have when you’re getting to do something that you’ve wanted to do since you were a kid.”
Jack White Responds After Uproar Over Taylor Swift Songwriting Comment
This is why we can’t have nice things.
Jack White posted a statement on Instagram Monday evening after numerous publications took his comments in an interview with The Guardian out of context. When discussing poetry and songwriting, White mentioned fellow musician Taylor Swift‘s style of songwriting, and explored his own approach to storytelling when creating music. Unfortunately, online outlets framed his words as a critique of the Tortured Poets star, especially when it came to headlines that quickly circulated on the internet.
“Putting this up for a day and then taking down to just put this to bed,” wrote White in the since-deleted post. “I didn’t say that I think Taylor Swift’s music was ‘boring’ or whatever click bait the net is trying to scrape together. What I was trying to say in an interview I did about poetry and lyric writing, was that I don’t find it interesting at all for ME to write about MYSELF in my own lyric writing and poetry because I think that it could be repetitive for ME to always write about and It could be uninteresting for people who listen to my music to delve into, and that imaginary characters are more attractive to me as a writer.”
White went on to acknowledge the “tremendous success” of Swift and other songwriters who have their own process, while stating that just “because I say I have a way of doing things doesn’t mean that I think that EVERYONE should do it the same way.” He added, “They should do what works for them, And they do, and it is obviously appealing to many people, and I’m glad to hear that.”
When asked by The Guardian in the article published Sunday, if any of any of his songs were entirely autobiographical, White replied, “Not too much. Now it’s become very popular in the Taylor Swift way of pop singers writing about all of their publicly aired break-ups, which I don’t find interesting at all. I think it’s a little bit boring for me to write about myself.”
White further explained, “Even if I’ve had a really interesting day, I feel like I’ve already lived that, I don’t need to go through it every time I sing this song. If it’s something really painful, I’m not going to put this important, painful thing that I went through out there for some idiot on the internet to stomp all over. So I put a percentage of that into what I do and then morph it into somebody else’s character. I can’t really learn about myself until I put it into somebody else’s shoes.”
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In his Monday statement, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee said that at times he has been “made less and less interested in doing interviews” amid the “age of this massive demand for click bait and content.” Any “scrape of anything interesting” can be used as drama and “spit out as bait,” he continued, leading White to “not want to answer questions with any sort of romance or passion or reflection as I’m too busy having to worry about accidentally triggering nonsense like this from so called ‘journalists’ and ‘editors.'”
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He ended his response to the wave of backlash following his interview by saying, “This has always been a problem as it encourages artists to give ‘safe’ answers to any question and stifles artistic vision and imagination and pushes all of us to not share anything interesting, which was one of the points I made about keeping private things private in that same interview. But yeah, content.”
ADVERTISEMENTWhite recently released Jack White: Collected Lyrics & Selected Writing Volume 1, a collection of lyrics from the artist’s solo recordings including No Name, The Raconteurs, and more, plus selected poems and writings by White, and essays by poet Adrian Matejka.