Maren Morris is leaving country music over all the hate in the industry

Maren Morris says she is leaving country music because of the industry’s history of racism, misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia.

The singer-songwriter and outspoken LGBTQ+ ally recently released a two-song E.P., The Bridge, on Columbia Records after having released her past three albums on the label’s Nashville imprint. In a recent statement, Morris described the E.P. as a first step away from the country music machine and the culture wars being waged within it.

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“I hate feeling like I need to be the hall monitor of treating people like human beings in country music.”

“These two songs are incredibly key to my next step because they express a very righteously angry and liberating phase of my life these last couple of years,” she wrote, “but also how my navigation is finally pointing towards the future, whatever that may be or sound like. Honoring where I’ve been and what I’ve achieved in country music, but also freely moving forward.”

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“I thought I’d like to burn it to the ground and start over,” she told the Los Angeles Times of her efforts to make change in the genre. “But it’s burning itself down without my help.”

“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,” she said. “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,” she continued. “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.”

Morris says that former President Donald Trump’s influence on the Republican party has emboldened people to put their biases “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 explained. “All these things were being celebrated, and it was weirdly dovetailing with this hyper-masculine branch of country music. I call it butt rock.”

While in the past Morris has jumped into the fray, calling out singer Jason Aldean’s wife for transphobic comments and daring Tennessee officials to arrest her for introducing her son to drag queens, she says she’s tried to avoid conversations around recent controversial country hits like Aldean’s “Try That in a Small Town.” The song and its accompanying video have been blasted for featuring racist dog whistles and violent imagery.

The video for her new single “The Tree” seems to be a direct response to Aldean’s song, with Morris wandering through an artificial small town where signs read “Go Woke, Go Broke” and “Welcome to Our Perfect Small Town From Sunrise to Sundown,” a reference to so-called “sundown towns” where non-white people were subjected to racist intimidation and violence. The song’s lyrics express Morris’s frustration with “the rot at the roots” of country music.

Morris described “Try That in a Small Town” as a “last bastion” of conservative resentment. “People are streaming these songs out of spite. It’s not out of true joy or love of the music. It’s to own the libs,” she said. “And that’s so not what music is intended for. 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 added that she’s fine with people perceiving her departure from country music as a victory for conservative fans of the genre. “I don’t want to have an adversarial relationship to country music,” she said. “These songs are obviously the result of that — the aftermath of walking away from something that was really important to you and the betrayal that you felt very righteously. But also knowing there’s a thread of hope as you get to the other side.”