Maren Morris Explains Her Decision to Leave ‘Really Toxic’ Country Music

Maren Morris is speaking out and clearing up any confusion about her break from country music. In an in-depth interview on the New York Times Popcast podcast, Morris delves into her experiences as an artist in Nashville alongside the public backlash she’s faced for voicing opinions about the industry’s shortcomings. 

“It’s just so blown out of proportion now,” she says of her announcement last month that she would be parting ways with country music, as she released a new two-song EP titled The Bridge. 

“I had been sitting on those songs since January and they were sort of following a ton of traumatic s**t,” she explains. “I felt like I really just, I don’t want to say goodbye, but I really cannot participate in the really toxic arms of this institution anymore.”

Morris calls the transition more “hyperbolic” than literal, explaining that she has asked for her music to not be considered for potential nominations on the country music awards circuit. The songstress previously shared that she has officially transitioned to Columbia Records from the label’s Nashville division. 

Morris has long been vocal about her support for the LGBTQ community and has spoken out against racism and misogyny, as well as other hot button issues. Last year, she was involved in a high-profile feud with with Jason Aldean, his wife, Brittany Aldean, over trans rights. Before that, she spoke out against Morgan Wallen when he was caught on camera using a racial slur, for which he’s since apologized.

“I couldn’t do this circus anymore of like feeling like l have to absorb and explain people’s bad behaviors and, you know, laugh it off,” she now says. “I just couldn’t do that after 2020 particularly. It was just like, I’ve changed. A lot of things changed about me that year.”

That was the year in which Morris became a mother, welcoming son Hayes with her husband, Ryan Hurd. It was also the year that her song, “The Bones,” achieved critical and commercial success, after which she notably used her CMA Award acceptance speech for Female Vocalist of the Year to empower women of color within country music. 

“It is so ingrained and sort of Pavlovian to just be like, ‘You are not allowed to criticize this family ever,'” she says of the genre. “You feel like, the shock collar. Not only are you ‘criticizing our way of life’ — which I’m not — ‘you’re criticizing every fundamental belief we have. You’re criticizing Jesus, you’re criticizing blue collar workers, you’re criticizing farmers.’ Like, they will go to these lengths to justify the abuse and discrepancies that exist within the machine of what this is.” 

In particular, Morris says she felt a fuse had been lit when she tweeted a barb against Wallen over his use of a slur. 

“I underestimated, like I have a lot, the power of the town and also every kind of broken thing about it and how it protects itself no matter what,” she shares, referencing Wallen’s success that has followed amid controversy. “It’s very historically accurate for that reaction to happen that way. So, yeah, that sucked not because I regret what I said, because I absolutely don’t. It needed to be condemned publicly by peers, not just radio or the label putting him on notice.” 

She continues, “The pain that it caused — and I’m not talking about the slur, because how would I know what that feels like? I’m white. For me, the fallout, oh my god, the death threats. And not just against me, but against my son. [I] could never have fathomed it would go there just off of criticizing a racial slur.” 

The backlash, she says, “felt like a warning shot.” And while she’s “not afraid to hold people accountable,” she also hates feeling like “that is my crown to wear every f**king time.” 

Moving forward with her music, Morris says she “had to find my own patch of grass” where “all are welcomed.” 

“I’m not shutting off fans of country music, or that’s not my intention,” she explains. “It’s just the music industry that I have to walk away [from]. But I think there’s so many progressive listeners too that listen to not just one genre, like, they can dabble in country and the next day they’re in hip hop, so I think that’s always kind of been my MO from the jump.” 

She also says that she has no plans to relocate from Nashville, Tennessee. 

“I love living in Nashville,” she says. “I have my family there. There’s a reason why people come there from L.A. and New York to write with us. It’s because we have amazing songwriters there, so that’s not gonna change.”
 

 

In making her upcoming LP, Morris previously told The Los Angeles Times that she’s realized that she “needed to purposely focus on just making good music and not so much on how we’ll market it… I’ve had to clear all of that out of my head this year and just write songs.”

She’s been doing that alongside frequent Taylor Swift collaborator Jack Antonoff, making an album with “quirky jam-band moments to, like, prog rock.” The process, Morris said, has been “so fun” and put her “back in this space of writing songs I love with people I love.”

“It’s like, let’s write something bats**t insane today, and it might suck, but this is what I used to do when I moved to Nashville 10 years ago. The freedom to fail, you know?” Morris said. “New collaborations have been helpful for me too in getting perspective on feeling like the hall monitor of country music. The people I’m working with now have no idea what’s going on or the names I’m talking about.”

As for the path she envisions for her career now, Morris said she looks to Swift, with whom she recently sang onstage during an Eras Tour show.

“She’s been such a great friend over the years and has been really helpful in ways she probably doesn’t even realize in conversations I’ve had with her about everything you and I have been talking about,” Morris said of Swift, before explaining why Linda Ronstadt is also an inspiration. “She’s weaved through so many different genres, and she just had one of those voices that can kind of fit anywhere because you believe her when she sings something.”

In an Instagram post about her new songs, Morris explained the meaning behind the tracks. “The Tree,” Morris wrote, is about “a toxic ‘family tree’ burning itself to the ground, adding, “By the end of the song, I give myself permission to face the sun, plant new seeds where it’s safer to grow and realize that sometimes there IS greener grass elsewhere.”

Meanwhile, she described “Get the Hell Out of Here” as “the aftermath of the tree burning,” writing, “Doing the right thing can feel lonely at times, but there are more friends than foes, so I finally quit making myself one of them.”