‘You need to let people know where you stand': Maren Morris on being country music's most outspoken star
For someone who's made a career out of righteously aggravating country music's conservative base, it's also typically provocative. Singing so slyly about same-sex lust in Nashville, the heart of the country music establishment, where Christian values still reign supreme: does it still feel taboo?
'I mean, less so than it used to. But maybe that's just because I've removed myself a bit from the machine of all that,' says Morris from her home in Nashville. Despite the assumptions of outside onlookers, Nashville is more than just the 'mechanism of mainstream country music,' the 35-year-old says.
'It is that, but there's also so much diversity here and it's always been that way. It's a progressive dot in the middle of a really conservative state, and it has to be because it's a music town. It has to lend itself to open-minded ideals, because we're making music here and we're empaths and we feel deeply.'
It's why Morris has never left the city, even if country music's more conservative forces have tried hard to excommunicate her. 'There's a heartbeat here that's very free and accepts people, and that's why I've chosen to remain here and make this my home. I have my community here that I love, but I also want to help make it better and redefine what people maybe think of the South or of country music.'
The same sentiment that seeps through Chappell Roan's The Giver, her '90s-flecked country hit about sapphic generosity, lives in Morris' Push Me Over. More than just a lavender moment for mainstream country, it's country outcasts staking their territory. We're as country as Mr All-American Blue Jeans, they seem to be saying, you can't tell us we don't belong.
'I'm such a fan [of Chappell] and I think what she's advocating for and doing musically is so important,' says Morris. 'You just know when you're watching a true artist be themselves, fully be themselves, and not follow a script or a paradigm. I don't want perfection from the artists I love; I want real, I want authenticity, and she's definitely that.'
I'm speaking to Morris over Zoom, but with some foresight I might've caught her in person. Last month I noticed a Reddit commenter wonder aloud if they'd really just spotted Morris in Sydney.
'Yeah, that was me, I was on vacation,' Morris laughs. 'I had a week off and I was like, I really want to have a little adventure before all the tours and album stuff kicks in. I'd always wanted to go to Sydney and just explore, be a random person. The only plan on the schedule was to get a tattoo.'
She lifts her forearm to show me the martini glass inked there by Sydney tattooist, Lauren Winzer. In a recent interview, Morris had mentioned it was her favourite drink. 'It is now. It's my 30-something cocktail. The dirtier, the better.'
The local souvenir, one she hopes to add to when she returns on tour next summer, is also a symbol of her lively new era. Dreamsicle – her first album since her divorce from longtime partner, country singer Ryan Hurd, with whom she shares a five-year-old son – finds Morris blending her pop sensibilities with her country DNA. For each Push Me Over, there's an emotional barnstormer like This is How a Woman Leaves, written with Madi Diaz. (The song ends on a pure country couplet: 'You have the nerve to ask why I'm not crying/ I did all my crying lying next to you'.)
'They're songs tackling all these feelings of liberation – sexual, personal, vulnerable, angry,' says Morris. 'That's kind of the through line of this record, it's someone in a mess finding themselves and finding their power again.'
A decade since her major label breakout, 2016's Hero, Morris remains one of country music's more intriguing figures, at once both insider and outsider. A Texan native, she started playing country fairs and rodeo circuits when she was 10 years old. After flunking at every reality TV singing competition (American Idol, America's Got Talent, The Voice, et al), she eventually made the move to Nashville and became a hired gun in the songwriting machine, before becoming a star in her own right with Hero 's smashes My Church and '80s Mercedes, and 2018's crossover EDM hit The Middle with Zedd.
In the intervening years, she also became one of country's loudest progressive voices, speaking out often and unequivocally against racism, misogyny and homophobia in its ranks. (In one memorable instance, responding to transphobic comments from Brittany Aldean – the wife of country star, Jason – she labelled her 'Insurrectionist Barbie'.)
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In an interview with New York Times ′ Popcast in 2023, Morris decried an ugly strain of 'hatefulness' in country music at the time, a period dominated by MAGA-fied culture wars around Jason Aldean's Try That In a Small Town, Oliver Anthony's Rich Men North of Richmond, and Morgan Wallen's post-slur comeback. That same year she told the Los Angeles Times she'd 'take a step back' from the country industry amid conservative backlash and death threats.
With some dust settled, does country feel less hateful now? 'I mean, I'm so out of the loop. But the people I hang around with here in Nashville and make music with are my best friends for a reason,' says Morris.
The backlash just let her know who's really onside, anyway. 'I've always been rebellious and risky, and it's totally fine if people don't get it, not everyone is supposed to. Of course, you're going to lose some people along the way, that's life. But you need to let people know where you stand.
'That's why the fan base I do have is so diverse and safe,' she adds. 'It's because I've stuck my neck out for them and vice versa. It's not been me just towing the line and keeping my mouth shut to keep coins in my pocket. I really believe in what I'm saying and what I'm writing, and I think that's only been a benefit to my work. I've just never had it in me to be a fence-sitter.' Pun completely unintended.
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