Maren Morris is thankful for girlfriends as she navigates the changing landscape of her career.
The country-star-turned-pop-singer is about to drop her fourth studio album, called Dreamsicle, and says she’s grateful to friends like Taylor Swift and The Chicks, who helped her figure out how a genre transition might look.
“I couldn’t have imagined a better support system than being able to talk to Martie [Maguire] and Emily [Strayer] and Natalie [Maines] and people like Taylor who have really navigated those worlds in very different ways, obviously,” Morris remarked during a TalkShopLive appearance (quote via People).
“It can feel really isolating sometimes.”
The Chicks were more or less ousted from country music after taking aim at then-President Bush in 2003, and while they still very much record and release true country music, it has never been the same for them from a commercial standpoint.
Swift, on the other hand, ventured into pop music on her own accord with her 2014 1989 album. She was still a country music darling at the time and remains a good friend to Music City to this day.
“Having those people that have been through some version of it, I mean, I would not be the same person today if someone who had gone through it had not given me some sort of like, you know, peace talk,” Morris continues.
She calls her talks with Swift and The Chicks “extremely helpful,” noting: “I love girls’ girls.”
Morris had several hits in the country sphere: “My Church” (2016) was her ultra-successful debut single which would lead to a Grammy win in 2017. “I Could Use a Love Song” and “Rich” followed and found comfort in the Top 10 on Billboard country charts.
Not long after, she began experimenting — and finding success with — crossover hits like “The Middle.”
She’ll release her next album Dreamsicle on May 9.
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Why Did Maren Morris Leave Country Music?
Morris decided to search for — ahem — greener pastures in 2023. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times that fall, she said that she needed to “take a step back” from a genre which was hurting her mental health. She saw cracks in the facade and recognized problems she saw in country music.
Morris that she’d “like to burn it (country music) to the ground and start over, but it’s burning itself down without my help.”
She told Variety that same fall that she knows she’s “been successful, but — I think — at a moral cost. I couldn’t keep doing the same song and dance.”
However, she has teetered some since, saying that you can take the girl out of Texas, where she’s from, but you can’t take the Texas out of the girl.
“… I’m not getting out of Dodge. I love living in Nashville, and I don’t consider myself an expat of country music,” she said in late 2023. “There’s so many amazing people here making music that matters. I’m a piece of this town, and I want to make it better in the same ways I want the music industry to be better.”
Morris switched from a country-specific record label, Columbia Nashville, to its broader net, Columbia Records, around the same time.
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