The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Watch out Taylor, she’s coming for your crown
Trump-baiting, gun-hating Maren Morris is a Nashville anomaly – and all the better for that, says Alice Vincent
On September 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 crowd was great. It was such a fun show.” She pauses. “That was the night before the shooting.”
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 (that she’d written three years earlier) 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”. Morris tells me that she has little time for “that conservative fan base… I don’t know if they’re more galvanised because Trump is our president. I just know that when I speak out, sometimes I lose fans.”
She taps her stiletto heels on the floor and leans towards 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 s----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. Every few minutes a train passes overhead and the whole room, lit by a single bulb, vibrates. Morris’s music videos and social media accounts had led me to expect a more rambunctious character. On Instagram (where her one-line biography reads “Still hung-over”), she describes her newly-wed husband, singersongwriter Ryan Hurd, as her “favourite drinking/life partner”. Her songs – brazen, big-chorused numbers steeped in liquor and heartbreak – tend to make her life sound like a beautiful mess. (One singalong fashions a chorus from a friend’s weary vow: “I gotta quit bummin’ cigarettes from the wrong guys”).
Yet in person she seems surprisingly poised – smoothing her skirt over her knee, her sparkly nail varnish glinting in the gloom – although you suspect there’s a toughness lingering just beneath the surface; the result, perhaps, of growing up a little bit too fast.
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 countrycrossover 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,