Pat McAfee’s Album Is Too Boring to Be Polarizing: Review

Former NFL punter and current podcasting star Pat McAfee is branching out into music with The Diary of a Polarizing Figure, an album so named even though it is not very personal and the only controversy seems to be to what extent AI was involved. How did this happen? Well, The Diary of a Polarizing Figure comes via the Big Loud songwriting factory and country super producer ERNEST, hit-writer for Morgan Wallen, Jelly Roll, Lainey Wilson, and more country artists with production so sugary-sweet it could give your ear a cavity. Jelly is the connector here, befriending McAfee and then telling him, “I gotta connect you with Ern,” as the producer recalled in an interview with Whiskey Riff. After one of the hosts mentioned that he didn’t think of McAfee as a musician, ERNEST responded: “He’s not a musician, but he definitely is a fan of music. He has been writing lyrics for years, like his phone is so full of notes, stream of consciousness, poetry, stuff like that. And he started plugging his lyrics in and chanting it into [AI music generator] Suno and getting Suno demos of his songs. And we came together and I was like, ‘Yo, we can go in and cut this stuff for real.'” First, it’s intere...