The budding country star Megan Moroney was 36 stories above Times Square last month, waiting to meet some of her biggest fans, who were among the first invited to hear “Am I Okay?,” her eagerly anticipated second album.
As she prepared to greet her guests in the glass aviary atop the Hard Rock Hotel, Moroney admitted she’d culled them via social media, group chats and meet and greets. “They don’t know I stalk them,” she said after slipping into a cobalt mini dress from Zara and a pair of metallic Balmain stiletto boots. Her hair teased into a butter-blond cloud, she joked, “It’s 20 pounds of hair and 10 pounds of makeup.” It’s a look her fans recreate to varying degrees, but they’re also drawn to the way Moroney embraces the moments most people airbrush out of their Instagram-perfect lives.
One example is the closer of “Am I Okay?,” which is due on Friday: the spare, simple “Hell of a Show.” It’s just a verse and a chorus, a raw artist singing over an acoustic guitar about being jerked around by a self-absorbed boyfriend, pulling it together to slay a crowd of people who “love me better than you could’ve,” but still crying herself to sleep.
It’s hard to believe there’s anyone who isn’t clamoring for the attention of this 26-year-old rising songwriter. Moroney was the leading female nominee at the Academy of Country Music Awards this spring, competing for top prizes alongside Kacey Musgraves and Lainey Wilson. Her rocket-ship trajectory began with “Tennessee Orange” in 2022, a Romeo and Juliet ballad for fans of SEC football, which earned her 18 record company offers and nominations for both the A.C.M.s’ and the Country Music Association Awards’ song of the year. (She ultimately signed with Sony’s Nashville and Columbia’s New York divisions.)
Four years ago, when Moroney released her first EP, she seemed like just another attractive Nashville hopeful in a city overstocked with them. At least on paper. But she had ideas about how to become a star, and they started with her songwriting. Wry, vulnerable and a real reflection of how 20-somethings drink and wreck their hearts, Moroney’s songs are authentic in a way the Music Row system can rarely access.
Juli Griffith, a three-decade publishing veteran who is now Moroney’s manager, recalled listening to her for the first time and thinking, “My God! That broken voice. You just believed her, and it struck you and stuck with you.”
Moroney, who grew up in Savannah, Ga., didn’t drink in high school and dated her brother’s best friend for two years — until he dumped her when he went to college. That first heartbreak shattered her, but also provided resilience when she realized she could survive.
She attended the University of Georgia and majored in accounting, getting a music business certificate in the process. Her parents wouldn’t allow her to drop out to pursue songwriting, so Moroney, who graduated with a 3.9, pledged Delta Gamma and doubled down on college life. She started writing songs, but not telling people. After the bro-country star Chase Rice saw her playing a set of covers before the singer Jon Langston performed at a sorority charity event, he asked her to open for him at Athens’s Georgia Theater, with one condition: She had to write an original song.
“In those four years, I grew up so much as a person, learned so much about who I am,” she said. “Everything you go through in college, between the heartbreaks and being so drunk that you’re literally fighting for your life on a curb, head between your legs — that builds character.”
Some emerging female artists would hesitate to be that candid. But Moroney’s brand of truth-telling, equally funny and wounded, has struck a chord. “If you get a little too drunk and call your ex, like, whatever,” she said. “I think that’s all normal and human.”
As she prepped for the Hard Rock event, Moroney discussed the artists who have provided her with inspiration. She was raised on a diet of John Prine, Eagles, Emmylou Harris and J.D. Souther by her father, and said her glammed-up look was partly a representation of a distinctly feminine power.
“I’ve always loved the way Dolly and Kacey have their hair up to the ceiling, you know?,” she said, referring to Parton and Musgraves. “It’s like they can say whatever they want, dressed like that.”
“Am I Okay?,” the follow-up to “Lucky” from last year, charts phases of several failed relationships, including one with a “Mr. Right” that was over before recording began; he inspired the title track’s euphoric vertigo of seemingly finding the one. “That started out really great, then was like, ‘Wait! This is actually pretty horrible,’” she said, laughing about the whiplash.
The new songs run an emotional gauntlet. There’s the too-good-to-be-true steel guitar celebration “Third Time’s a Charm”; a darker, minimalist track called “I Know You” that skewers a cheating soon-to-be-ex with layers of harmony that echo like voices in one’s head; and “Indifferent,” which grows from acoustic to bombastic as Moroney bids a relationship goodbye with a dismissive wave.
“It’s like I’m 26, dating people, and you’re going to be wrong,” she said. “OK, fine. That’s the point: It happened, and I’m OK. It’s happening to someone right now, thinking this is the one. They’re not, and it’s going to be OK.”
Kristian Bush, Moroney’s producer (and half of the Grammy-winning country act Sugarland), joined her in New York for the event. Moroney, who had been a publishing intern at his publishing company in Marietta, Ga., called Bush shortly after she moved to Nashville, and he swung into action. “When Megan told me what she was doing, I got very protective and called Juli, my longtime publisher,” he said. “Meg was a pretty girl, and I know how those rooms can be; Juli was the only one I trusted.”
Once convinced of Moroney’s work ethic, Griffith signed on as her manager and set up recording sessions with people who “would let Meg lead,” which included Jessi Alexander, Luke Laird and Jessie Jo Dillion, the daughter of the Country Music Hall of Fame inductee Dean Dillon, who all have multiple writing credits on “Okay?” In the recording studio, Moroney prefers older-school processes to assemble a sound she calls “a vintage car that flies”: actual musicians playing together instead of relying on drum machines, computer tracks and overdubbed instruments. (She has branded her sound “emo cowgirl country.”)
“I know in my songs there’s a lot of I’m bringing men down,” Moroney said, adding that she’d only been in love three times. “But I always make jokes to the audience, ‘Clearly, I love men, because I keep coming back and I keep trying, it just keeps not working out.”
Her honesty and wit has turned even casual listeners into loyal fans. At the Hard Rock, around 40 arrived from as far away as Arizona, California, Florida and even Canada. Some wore T-shirts with Moroney’s picture and the words “Feminine Rage.” After gathering in a room filled with cobalt and silver heart-shaped balloons, Moroney played all 14 songs and offered (at times laughing) commentary. The already released singles had everyone singing along with gusto, and “Heaven by Noon,” a ballad inspired by an uneventful last call between her aunt and uncle on Sept. 11, hours before his death in the attack on the World Trade Center brought even the men in the room to tears. (They cried at some of the relationship songs, too.)
Moroney will be bringing the music to many more people at headlining shows this summer, along with her ongoing opening slot on Kenny Chesney’s stadium and amphitheater tour, and she’ll be paying attention to the details. If her dating life has been a minefield, she believes using the shrapnel for her career is intentional: “Things don’t happen to me, they happen for me,” she said. And there have been important lessons in the highs and lows of her personal and professional lives so far.
“To me, the strong people can look at the sad situation, and be like, ‘That was really messed up. You hurt my feelings.’ Maybe I’ll have a song and be vulnerable by saying that,” she said. “But, also, I’ll follow it up with a song that’s like ‘I’m going to be just fine. Don’t worry about it.’”
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