Maren Morris Announces She’s Leaving Country Music, Blames ‘The Trump Years’

AP – NDZ/STAR MAX/IPx 2023 5/13/23

Singer Maren Morris got her start in country music, but now the artist is parting ways with the genre the “Trump years.”

In recent years Morris has been more out spoken about her political beliefs. Morris got into an online spat with fellow country singer Jason Aldean’s wife, Brittany Kerr in 2022 over comments about the trans community and bashed proposed Tennessee law against drag shows in 2023.

Now, in an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Morris reveals that she’s ready to step away from the country genre altogether.

“The further you get into the country music business, that’s when you start to see the cracks. 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,” Morris said in the interview.

“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,” Morris said.

“Country music is a business, but it gets sold, particularly to young writers and artists who come up within it, as almost a god. 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,” Morris said.

When asked what changed her perspective, Morris cited former President Donald Trump ushering in a new era in country music fandom.

“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. All these things were being celebrated, and it was weirdly dovetailing with this hyper-masculine branch of country music,” Morris explained.

The artist added, “I don’t want to have an adversarial relationship to country music. I still find myself weirdly wanting to protect it. But it’s not a family member. That’s the f*cked-up part, is that I’m talking about it as if it’s a person, but it’s not. So it’s a lot of deep deconstructing that I’m still unraveling.”

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