Maren Morris has announced that she is leaving country music.
She cites bigotry from fellow artists and industry higher-ups as the reason for her departure. In a recent interview with the Los Angeles Times, Morris said “after the Trump years, people’s biases were on full display.”
“It just revealed who people really were and that they were proud to be misogynistic and racist and homophobic and transphobic,” she continued. “All these things were being celebrated, and it was weirdly dovetailing with this hyper-masculine branch of country music.”
Morris also told the publication that speaking up for progressive causes “doesn’t make you popular” in country music. Morris has always been a vocal supporter of LGBTQ+ rights. After Tennessee infamously banned public drag performances, Morris invited drag queens on stage at her concert and said “Tennessee, f*cking arrest me.”
Last year, country singer Jason Aldean’s wife, Brittany Aldean, posted a video to Instagram with the caption, “I’d really like to thank my parents for not changing my gender when I went through my tomboy phase. I love this girly life.”
Morris tweeted in response to Aldean’s suggestively transphobic caption, “It’s so easy to, like, not be a scumbag human? Sell your clip-ins and zip it, Insurrection Barbie.”
“Music is supposed to be the voice of the oppressed — the actual oppressed. And now it’s being used as this really toxic weapon in culture wars,” Morris told the Los Angeles Times, referencing Aldean’s song “Try That In A Small Town.”
Morris may be leaving country music, but she isn’t leaving music all together. Her new two-track EP The Bridge features songs “The Tree” and “Get The Hell Out Of Here” that deal with her feelings about transitioning out of the genre. In “The Tree” she sings, “The rot at the roots is the root of the problem, But you wanna blame it on me, I hung around longer than anyone should.”
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