As heavily implied by new songs "The Tree" and "Get the Hell Out of Here," Maren Morris has come to a crossroads in her mainstream career 10 years after she arrived in Nashville. Music videos for both cast the small-town ideals of many country stars as being as "authentic" as a model railroad layout, and the lyrics deconstruct Morris' frustrations over trying to improve country music from the inside.
Videos by Wide Open Country
"I thought I'd like to burn it to the ground and start over," Morris told the LA Times about distancing herself from the country music establishment. "But it's burning itself down without my help."
In the same feature, Morris passed on commenting in-depth on Jason Aldean's "Try That in a Small Town" in the wake of Morris' past condemnations of Aldean's wife, Brittany Aldean.
"I'd say, sure, congratulations on crossing over onto the big all-genre chart," Morris said. "But the stories going on within country music right now, I've tried to avoid a lot of it at all costs. I feel very, very distanced from it."
Morris focused instead on how stepping away from a genre she's loved since a young age has freed her creatively.
"The way I grew up was so wrapped in country music, and the way I write songs is very lyrically structured in the Nashville way of doing things," she explained. "But I think I needed to purposely focus on just making good music and not so much on how we'll market it. The last few records, that's always been in the back of my mind: Will this work in the country music universe?
"Obviously, being one of the few women that had any success on country radio, everything you do is looked at under a microscope," she continued. "You're scrutinized more than your male peers, even when you're doing well. So I've had to clear all of that out of my head this year and just write songs. A lot of the drama within the community, I've chosen to step outside out of it."
Morris' laments come across less as a condemnation of other artists' socio-political stances and more as a critique of the entire Nashville machine.
"The further you get into the country music business, that's when you start to see the cracks," she said. "And once you see it, you can't un-see it. So you start doing everything you can with the little power you have to make things better. That doesn't make you popular. But I don't think that biting the hand that fed you is a real thing. It's kind of a fallacy at this point, with all this fear-mongering about getting Dixie Chick-ed and whatnot.
"Country music is a business, but it gets sold, particularly to young writers and artists who come up within it, as almost a god," she continued. "It kind of feels like indoctrination. If you truly love this type of music and you start to see problems arise, it needs to be criticized. Anything this popular should be scrutinized if we want to see progress. But I've kind of said everything I can say. I always thought I'd have to do middle fingers in the air jumping out of an airplane, but I'm trying to mature here and realize I can just walk away from the parts of this that no longer make me happy."
