Country first: Morris sheds shyness
Candour is rare in conservative Nashville
On Sept. 30, 2017, Maren Morris sang at the Route 91 Harvest festival in Las Vegas. “I remember walking away from there thinking, ‘I usually don’t like coming to Vegas but that was really cool,’ ” says Morris, a 28-year-old Texan who pipped Loretta Lynn to the Grammy for best country solo performance earlier that year.
The following day, a gunman opened fire on the festival crowds from his window on the 32nd floor of the city’s Mandalay Bay Hotel, killing 58 people and injuring a further 500.
Among country music’s predominantly conservative fan base, the massacre prompted awkward conversations about gun control, but for Morris it wasn’t a time for prevarication. Within 24 hours, she had released Dear Hate, a ballad whose pretty tune belies its firm stance against firearms.
“Hate is everywhere, and I’m sick of not doing enough,” she said at the time. “I wanted to help,” she tells me now, “to try to heal the people that survived and the people who had lost their friends and family.”
The popularity of the song — which has earned Morris two of her five nominations at next month’s Grammys — quickly spread beyond country music’s traditional borders. When Morris performed Dear Hate in Manchester, in the wake of the May 2017 arena bombing that killed 22, she says she “witnessed the weight of that song hitting people.”
She has remained vociferous on the issue of firearms ever since, even when it has meant upsetting country’s old guard. After she posted on her Instagram account a photograph of Emma Gonzalez — a teenage survivor of the 2018 Parkland high school attack who has become a spokesman for the anti-gun lobby — she says she “lost 10,000 followers.”
She taps her stiletto heels on the floor and leans toward me. “I’m starting to care less and less about keeping my mouth shut and the repercussions of (not doing) that,” she says. “I’m not in this for people’s money. When I have kids, I want them to grow up in a slightly less terrible world.”
We’re talking backstage at Omeara, the tiny London venue, tucked beneath railway arches, where Morris is preparing to perform to an intimate crowd of 320. It is a far cry from the O2 Arena, where she played last time she was in the English capital, in 2017, or the Royal Albert Hall, where she will be appearing later this year.
Morris’s career began before her teens, when she was encouraged to go on the road by her parents, a graphic designer father and hairdresser mother. “My parents are Republicans, I’m sure they voted for Trump,” she says, when I ask about them. “I just don’t even really get into it with them because I don’t want to go there.”
She quickly became “this teenage touring artist in Texas,” mingling with other country-crossover stars such as Kacey Musgraves and Miranda Lambert. But by 21, she says, she was “over it.” Rejected by producers from American Idol and The Voice, she fled the limelight for Nashville. Having written songs for her own amusement since she was 12, she says she wanted to “learn how to write songs for the radio” — and she did, placing hits with country greats such as Tim McGraw and Kelly Clarkson.
But it soon became clear that the best person to sing Maren Morris’s songs was Morris herself. When she recorded and released a handful of them on Spotify in 2015, major label executives were among the surge of listeners who helped the songs notch up 2.5 million streams in a matter of weeks.
Her debut album, Hero, was released by Columbia Records a year later and won her that Grammy.
While she acknowledges Willie Nelson, Randy Foster and Waylon Jennings as influences, she says her “obsession with how to break a song apart” has never been bound by genre: she studied the hits of Lauryn Hill as closely as those of LeAnn Rimes. Girl, the first single from her forthcoming second album has the glissando vocals and thudding guitar chords of a Beyoncé ballad; it’s just the kind of thing to rattle up the charts in the bleary first weeks of 2019.
Girl appears to cement Morris’s place in the increasingly populous realm of “country-crossover”; a bridge between mutually suspicious genres — country and pop — that had maintained their boundaries for decades until the mainstream successes of country stars such as Taylor Swift. Is Morris ready to follow in Swift’s footsteps? “I’m not, like, crossing over to pop,” she says. “I would probably be kidding myself if I ever called myself a pop star.”
And yet, Morris lent her voice to one of the biggest pop hits of 2018: The Middle. Engineered by superstar producer Zedd, the song was a year in the making, strung out by his worldwide search for the perfect vocalist. Morris was reportedly the 15th singer to submit a demo (following established stars such as Carly Rae Jepsen and Demi Lovato) and Zedd was won over by the quality of yearning that Morris could invest into the song’s simple lyrics. Her version is up for Record of the Year at the Grammys, against Drake, Lady Gaga and Kendrick Lamar.
Yet if this pop success is just the first stage of Morris’s secret plan for a Swiftstyle world takeover, then she’s not letting on. “When I was thrust into the public eye, people knowing my name, knowing where I live, it emboldened me to be more fearless,” she says. “It’s like, stuff is going to happen either way, I might as well enjoy myself.”