Maren Morris Is Proud To Be A Mess

Even pop stardom can’t spare you from a bad first date — a lesson Maren Morris found out the hard way. “There was one date I was on where the guy just felt compelled to kiss me at the end,” she says. “I was like, ‘That is so weird on first dates.’ Unless it is just from-the-jump sexual chemistry, I feel like it’s an interview, the first date or dinner or drink. I can’t even fathom doing a full dinner on the first interaction. No — I don’t know you. You’re a stranger. And you’re trying to kiss me?”

Though she has some practice dating, Morris, 35, is in no hurry to settle down again. It’s been more than a year since she finalized her divorce from fellow musician Ryan Hurd, with whom she shares 5-year-old son Hayes, and the Grammy-winning singer-songwriter is relishing her personal space — especially not having to share a bathroom. “I can just sprawl out all my skin care and display all my fragrances,” she says, laughing. “I have joked that I want to be like Frida Kahlo and her husband and just live next door to each other,” says Morris. “If I ever meet someone that I want to be romantically linked to, I’ll be like, ‘You can live next door.’ Frida and her husband, their bedrooms were connected by a bridge. That’s about as close as I want to be to someone.”

Meeting new people, at the very least, has been great fodder for her art. “Whatever dates that have transpired this past year or so helped finish out the record,” she says of Dreamsicle, her fourth studio album. Out this Friday, its 14 tracks capture the singer in the middle of all kinds of transformations and transitions — and not just in her relationship status: This is a woman navigating her identity (she publicly came out as bisexual last year) and an artist boldly breaking away from the country music world she came up in. Yes, songs like “I Hope I Never Fall in Love” and “This Is How a Woman Leaves” clearly reflect the sadness and melancholy of love lost. But she’s also finding the humor in upending her life, too. On the playful synth-pop track “Cut!,” a duet with pop hitmaker Julia Michaels, Morris dares to poke fun at the pressure to keep it together in public while embracing a good meltdown behind closed doors (“Honestly, f*ck! / I’ve held it in long enough!”).

“I think you have to be able to laugh at the sad tragedies of life — to know that everything ends and it’s out of your control,” she says. “You can be upset about it and let it plague you forever and feel jaded. Or you can laugh and move on and take the lesson: better luck next time.”

Morris is doling out this wisdom from a large leather sofa in the middle of Lykke Haus, a vintage treasure trove in Nashville that’s doubling as the location for today’s photoshoot. The place is full of warm, retro glamour — the same aesthetic she tried to evoke with Dreamsicle’s album art and visuals. The ’70s in particular loomed large on her moodboard: The album has “everything from something very folksy, singer-songwriter, stripped-back, to something you can dance to,” she says. “That feels like the ’70s to me because it’s like Fleetwood Mac to Studio 54.”

“She is in real life who she is in her music,” says Sheryl Crow. “She is always asking the hard questions and trying to make sense of them for all of us.”

When she’s performing on stage, “I love some glitter, rhinestones, flash. Love some disco on stage,” Morris says. Off duty, however, she mostly sticks to neutrals. Today Morris is casually clad in a cropped white strapless top and roomy light-wash jeans that sit easy on her hips. She describes her personal style as having the color of “untrammeled sand” and says her home is full of beiges — “but not in a basic way.”

“I want it to feel really calm because the inside of my head is always ‘go, go, go,’” she continues. “I don’t sleep very well, especially before album stuff. I just think about every single detail until 5 in the morning, and then I’ll sleep for two hours. Sometimes, I have to get up and be a mother or go get on an early flight. My style and my home living space have to feel like a spa.” (For more on Morris’s fashion go-tos, check out our interview with her longtime stylist, Dani Michelle, here.)

Morris’ eclectic style is something of a mirror to her career. As a wide-eyed 22-year-old — equipped with not much more than a U-Haul and “a healthy dose of delusion,” as she once put it — Morris moved to Music City in 2013 with one goal: to write music. Prior to the big move, she’d been playing the Texas bar and club circuit since age 11, with her father in the role of booking agent and manager. She was no stranger to rejection either, having auditioned for a slew of reality shows, including American Idol, America’s Got Talent, The Voice, and Nashville Star.

“I think people like cosplaying at it or doing it because it’s trendy,” she says of country music, which is currently experiencing a pop-chart renaissance. “That’s never been me. You can Google my history very easily and find articles from the Star-Telegram when I was 10, and you’ll see the same little girl playing the guitar, singing country music. I think I always have to remind myself that that’s the same girl.”

“Where you’re in this free-for-all postdivorce reckoning, community has been so necessary for me and life-saving.”

Once she got to Nashville, country music couldn’t contain all her talents. Morris first found success as a songwriter for the likes of Tim McGraw and Kelly Clarkson before breaking out with 2016’s Hero, which drew critical acclaim for its canny mix of pop and R&B influences. But everything blew open with “The Middle,” her surprise team-up with EDM stars Zedd and Grey. The song topped charts around the world and cemented Morris as a pop star as much as a country star.

“[My career] has just been all over the place,” says Morris (who also formed country supergroup The Highwomen with Brandi Carlile, Natalie Hemby, and Amanda Shires). “That’s a freedom that I’ve broken through and fought for since Day One. I’ve always had artistic freedom, but I don’t know if I had the confidence to truly own it until now, unapologetically.”

Over the years, Morris became equally famous for her industry advocacy; in addition to regularly speaking out about racial and gender disparities in country music, she famously roasted Brittany Aldean, wife of country superstar Jason Aldean, for comments she made about trans people on Instagram. (When Tucker Carlson went after Morris on Fox News in response, she turned his comments into a T-shirt to raise money for GLAAD and Trans Lifeline.) But being on the front lines of change could be dispiriting, to say the least. In September 2023, Morris suggested to the Los Angeles Times that she was leaving country music behind due to its “unwillingness to honestly reckon with its history of racism and misogyny and to open its gates to more women and queer people and people of color.” The country world was up in arms.

“There are songs to write, and you can’t do that living in your own head. You have to not just UberEats all your meals. You have to go be a person.”

Today, she clarifies that the departure is less about the kind of music she wants to make than the kind of institutions she wants to be a part of (or not). “I’m taking the stuff that is a part of my identity, which is being from the South and growing up on country music,” she says. “Country music is not a classroom that you just leave. It’s a family. It’s a sound. It’s a feeling. It’s an emotion. That’s not what I meant when I was going through that transition. It was about: ‘Do I want to put my life’s work in the hands of some of these gatekeepers of mainstream country music?’”

Still, Morris — who has since moved from Columbia Nashville to its all-genre sister label, Columbia Records — has more leeway to be herself now. That freedom is nowhere more evident on Dreamsicle than “Push Me Over,” a sparkling electro-pop tune about embracing her bisexuality that she co-wrote with MUNA. (You can only imagine the feathers a line like “sittin’ on the fence feels good between my legs” would ruffle in the Nashville establishment.) In June 2024, in honor of Pride Month, Morris announced in an Instagram post that she was “Happy to be the B in LGBTQ+.”

“I’ve always known that I am attracted to men and women,” she tells me. “I think because I’ve been in straight relationships the last 15 years of my life, which has been consumed by my music career and living in Nashville, I never felt brave enough to talk about it.”

Of course, that all changed over the last few years. “That was just a facet of me that I didn’t think I wanted private anymore. I wanted to be able to connect with my fans and my queer community,” she says. “Especially in a time where you’re in this free-for-all post-divorce reckoning, community has been so necessary for me and life-saving. Being honest and being vulnerable is the only way that you find community.”

Morris’ house sits on a quiet cul-de-sac in Nashville. She likes her neighbors and the peace with which she can walk her dachshund pup, Alfie. It’s also five minutes up the road from Hurd, which makes drop-offs particularly convenient. “Our stops are really easy, and we’ll have family dinners,” she says. She thinks it might be her forever home. “My business manager tells me it needs to be a long-term home because of how much we renovated,” she says dryly. When I ask about splurges, she lights up describing the amethyst Turkish marble sink “that’s like 800 pounds” in her powder room. And then there’s the pool cover, a must for any homeowner with a young child running around. “I think that was 80 grand,” she says. “Not a fun 80 grand, but you’re like, ‘I’m going to sleep so much better at night.’”

Morris and Hurd alternate weeks with Hayes. “Those weeks I have him, the house is full of chaos and energy and laughter and scraped knees,” she says. “And then, when he is not there, you have to recalibrate your alone-ness because you’re like, ‘Wow, this is just me in here now.’ That’s when I’ve leaned into it and not been drowned by my own company.”

“I think you have to be able to laugh at the sad tragedies of life — to know that everything ends and it’s out of your control.”

When she’s not “nesting into herself,” she’s hitting up the tight circle of friends she’s assembled during her decade-plus in Nashville. Lately, she’s looked to pals like Nashville real estate agent Leisa Hans and music legend Sheryl Crow for wisdom about divorce, co-parenting, or juggling mom life with a music career. “It’s just so nice to know mothers that have gone through this and made it out the other side,” Morris says. “Their kids are happy, and they’re friends with their exes, and they have family dinners. I’m getting into that space now, which is so much more peaceful.”

Crow says Morris is just as much of an inspiration to her. “Maren Morris is one of my favorite people and what an amazingly authentic artist she is!” she tells TZR. (Crow has a home studio inside her horse barn, where artists like Morris and Kacey Musgraves have recorded over the years.) “She is in real life who she is in her music, and that is one of the things I love most about her. She is always searching and asking the hard questions and trying to make sense of them for all of us.”

Spontaneity is a new development in Morris’ life. Most recently, she flew off to Australia for some final carefree moments before the marathon of album promotion. “Made some friends, got a tattoo, ate really well, and just soaked in every moment of it,” she says nonchalantly. “When I’m home, it’s the best because sometimes I’ll jet off to New York. I went and saw my friend Cassadee Pope in Titanìque off-Broadway, and that was nice to just have the freedom to do so and not have to ask someone’s schedule or permission.”

Making time for herself in this way would have felt almost unimaginable even two years ago. But Morris is trying to lean into change — even when it’s uncomfortable. She doesn’t hesitate when I ask her about her goals for the rest of the year. “I think just keep being a mess and vulnerable and showing up,” she says. “Not caving into myself, because there are people to meet and songs to write, and you can’t just do that living in your own head. You have to not just UberEats all your meals. You have to go be a person. That’s feeling harder and more anxious to do every day. It’s going against my own grain to put myself out there all the time — and not just in a dating way — but just in a life-experience way.”

She doesn’t like the word reset — it’s a little too black-and-white for her. “This feels not like a starting-over depressing thing,” she says. “I’m glad to have the remainder of my 30s to just truly be who I am, unapologetically so.”