Sitting in a green room at The Tonight Show on a brief break from the day’s rigorous studio requirements, Texas-born songwriter Maren Morris is as much at ease talking about the sharps, flats, and compositions that make up her newly released album D R E A M S I C L E as she is considering the sad and happy life events that brought her to that album’s logical conclusions. Throughout the record—a chill spot designed to melt from its heated, heartfelt emotions and stirringly quavering vocals—production partnerships with Jack Antonoff, Greg Kurstin, Laura Veltz, and The Monsters & Strangerz team are as crucial to Morris’s mixed-vibe, harmony-filled musicality as is having lived through the still-fresh feelings behind baby rearing, divorce, and bisexual awakening. That restlessness and seamless switching between country, bluegrass, R&B, ABBA-esque pop, and electro-club music suits the glad-to-mad lyricism of her new album smartly.
Change is what makes Morris tick. “I think that I’m a pretty adaptive person, something that comes from the time I first learned how to co-write in Music Row writing rooms when I first moved to Nashville,” Morris says in consideration of moving through early country-inspired hits like “My Church” alongside rave-electronic smashes such as “The Middle” with Zedd. Rather than remain in one camp or the other, she chose both and neither simultaneously. “I never had that ego when going into any creative writing session where there was an endpoint in mind. My goal, then and now, was to go into the room—whether alone, with old friends or new collaborators—and tell the truth.” No matter what mood or musicality each fresh song could touch upon, finding new pockets of sound, “and a place where I could pour my heart out through a lyric,” is what’s most important to Morris—far beyond sticking to one genre or emotion.
The songs that move me the most from the album—the Dolly-like harmonies of “Too Good,” the gentle acoustic “Dreamsicle” theme—also remind me most of Morris’ Texas country roots. “After listening to the demos so many times, ‘Too Good’ was addictive,” she says. “But the build-up of vocals throughout the song—after this big moment where I sing ‘You still owe me rent’—it needed to keep building from that starkness. So there’s an alternate harmony chorus happening on top of that melody.” After singing that explanation to me, she notes how the B-G-B is completely off-rhythm. “It needed something else, and that felt very Dolly-esque to me, a bit ABBA—even the top of ‘Too Good’ has that ‘Delta Dawn’ thing in the a cappella. And on ‘Dreamsicle,’ I wanted this lush bed of vocals as the choruses progressed.”
“I never had that ego when going into any creative writing session where there was an endpoint in mind. My goal, then and now, was to go into the room and tell the truth.”
Like Patsy Cline and Linda Ronstadt, or recent collaborators Stevie Nicks and Sheryl Crow, Parton has forever been a constant in Morris’ life and influences. A song such as “Cut!,” however, takes its cues from her end-of-the-day idea of “just being your messy self” with the help of her duet partner Julia Michaels’ spur-of-the-moment title, a Swedish-pop synth-and-drum-machine snap, and a cinematic framework where yelling “‘Cut!’ / I need a moment to just let my tears fall where they want” together come across like a film-noir drama. There’s a similar airtight sprightliness to the melody and arrangement on “Cry in the Car” (and its moments of “deep breakdown jealousy”)—but listen to its tears-in-the-rear-seat lyrics, and like other D R E A M S I C L E heartbreakers “Bed, No Breakfast” and “Push Me Over,” you figure out that Morris’ stock in trade is matching pain to infectious chorus lines and codas.
Yet if you’re looking for the wellspring of deep emotion tied to a trembling voice that would catch Roy Orbison’s attention from the grave, stop at “This Is How a Woman Leaves”—a song that seems to be as much about walking away from a relationship as it is running from Nashville, from the convention of single-genre hit-making, from cisgender confines, from all of the above and none of it. “I wrote this with my friend Madi Diaz, who did the first verse and chorus and sent it to me,” says Morris. “I typically don’t take songs that have been started. I like being in the room as they’re created. But this one, Madi sent it over a text at a time when I was in the thick of stuff in my personal life, and the lyrics just spoke to me. I immediately had ideas for a second verse and everything. And the day I did the vocals, woof… You really have to have stamina, as it’s such a leap. If I wasn’t in shape, I would’ve been exhausted singing that song once through. It’s supposed to have that desperation and urgency. I think I achieved that.”
“With my albums, it’s just about me feeling my way through it, letting your life happen in between sessions, and having whoever you’re writing with help you reflect on those new moments as they go by.”
D R E A M S I C L E is such a stunningly progressive record filled with heartbreak, tradition, invention, and re-invention that I can’t help but wonder where Morris goes from here. That’s good. I think that she wants us to keep guessing, as curiosity as such is her due north. “I’ll always have some idea to start that sounds nothing like it does when I’m done, or where I’ll go next. My compass is always getting in the room and just seeing what happens. I’ve never been a concept-record sort of artist, save for maybe the Highwomen album I did where we mapped it out and had Dave Cobb produce. With my albums, it’s just about me feeling my way through it, letting your life happen in between sessions, and having whoever you’re writing with help you reflect on those new moments as they go by. So, I never know.”
What Maren Morris does know is why the image of an icy dreamsicle suited this particular set of songs, and how all of the emotions and sonic “all-over-the-place, unexpected-and-fresh” vibes of its tracks worked toward a sweet, creamy finale. “The ice cream truck that would come to our cul-de-sac when I was growing up in Texas…it was the dreamsicle that was the biggest thing on the menu, and the treat that I always got,” she says. “That evoked a certain nostalgia for me. A fleeting beauty of the moment. It reminded me of home, yet it reminded me that I can’t be overly nostalgic. You can drown in that, so you must remain present. It’s not about looking forward or looking back, but standing in the middle of the great and the shitty things that are happening to you, and allowing yourself to live it all." FL
