While pop megastars like Beyoncé and Post Malone are going country, one of the genre’s biggest stars is going in the opposite direction. It was just over a year ago that Maren Morris announced she was leaving country music by declaring the scene was “burning itself down.” She dropped her The Bridge EP as an apparent farewell to the sounds of her previous efforts, and opened her new pop-focused chapter with this summer’s Intermission EP.
“There’s obviously more to come, but I think this was a nice, sort of appetizer teaser of music,” Morris told Kyle Meredith With… podcast host Kyle Meredith at Louisville’s Bourbon & Beyond Festival. “I’m still writing, and I have a few more writing trips to LA this fall just to see what is left in the gun. But I’ve written so much for this project that I’m excited to get it out. It just feels like there’s no deadline or rush, but certainly at the end of the day, I’m an album girl. I love full bodies of work.”
As she goes on to note, it’s been a hell of a year for “bodies of work” by female artists, with “girly pop summer” dominating the pop culture conversation. “It’s been an insane year of albums, a big year for women. It’s really inspiring for me as a writer and just a woman in the industry — but I think it’s gonna be a bloodbath at the Grammys this year,” Morris joked. “The quality is just there, and that’s so encouraging, especially when so much in the music industry is sort of… not hopeless, but with people not making as much money touring or streaming or writing. In terms of women and pop just dominating right now, it makes me excited to get back in the room and really hone in on what I want to say.”
While Morris is inspired by her peers, sometimes that inspiration can go a bit too far, like the time she accidentally stole a Dolly Parton melody: “On my second album, Girl, I realized one of my songs — after we had already turned everything in and mixed and mastered the album, like it was coming out in two months — I kind of realized a melody of one of my songs was on top of Dolly Parton’s ‘9 to 5.’ And I was a little bit freaked out and heartbroken, because I would never want to copy someone on purpose, but it was just this sort of stair-step melody. So I reached out to her, and she was so cool about it. She wrote me a letter back, because I offered her a percentage of the publishing because I was like, ‘I’m pretty sure this is close enough to your melody that you should take some of this.’ And she was like, ‘Absolutely not.’ So that was so cool of her.”
See what else Maren Morris has to say about going pop and her inspirations by watching the full interview above. Then, catch her on tour this fall supporting P!NK or in January at Brandi Carlile’s Girls Just Wanna Weekend festival by getting tickets here.
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