MAREN MORRIS: HITTING THE MOVING BULLSEYE

FEBRUARY 2026

Words by Vasili Papathanasopoulos

Photographs by Kirt Barnett

Maren Morris has spent the past decade solidifying herself as one of country musics most formidable voices. With four number one country radio hits, a GRAMMY® Award, five ACM Awards, five CMA Awards, and three Billboard Music Awards under her belt, Morris is experiencing a renaissance with her fourth studio album, D R E A M S I C L E.

The three years between albums marked a profound period of change for Morris, shaped as much by personal reckoning as well as professional disillusionment. As her marriage dissolved, she stepped away from the country music industry altogether; citing deep-seated cultural and political frustration with what she has described as its "toxic" atmosphere. In 2024 Morris came out as bisexual. Those intersectional shifts became the pillars on which D R E A M S I C L E was formed, an album forged throughout grief, anger and eventual renewal. “For me, I couldn't rush the grieving process of several things that were transforming and falling apart and coming back together in my life at that moment. So I just had to let the songs come out,” Morris explains. She tells me early writing sessions for the record were heavy, reflecting on what she describes as a non-linear emotional cycle that moved from vulnerability to rage and back to sadness. Morris spent over two years working on the record, and admits that had she not taken the time to settle into her thoughts and emotions, D R E A M S I C L E could have housed a very different tone. “If I had just cut my time in half and only had those sad and angry songs, which I love and think are important, it's not the whole arc of the story. I didn't have a plan really. I didn't know if I was ever going to feel joy again to write songs.” That shift arrived roughly eighteen months in, as songwriting served as a form of therapy and levity slowly re-entered her life. “I started to see the light, the sun cracking through the clouds, and I was able to just laugh again. Laugh at myself, laugh at the just ridiculousness of life and circumstance and dating again,” she recalls, noting that the albums moments of sarcasm and humour emerged towards the end. Even then, the lighter tones remained tethered to rawness, reflecting a newly calibrated sense of self. “It's like I'm impervious to pain or embarrassment at this stage,” Morris laughs. “So I feel like it was definitely a lot of like skin shedding by the end.”

One of the albums most pivotal grounding points is its refusal to crown a villain. Rather than using the record as a vehicle for spite or retribution, Morris turns inward to trace the quieter, more difficult work of heartbreak, healing and emotional reckoning. As a songwriter, she resists flattening the complexities of relationships into easy narratives - a discipline she admits is a constant, conscious presence in the writing room. “That is the challenge each time,” she says. Especially coming from this background of country songwriting, it's like, 'how specific do you wanna be?' You're painting a picture and you don't wanna be so vague that it's like blah and vanilla and feels like something you'd hear in a department stores [laughs].” To avoid that, Morris walks a careful line: grounding her songs in details that are unmistakably her own, whilst allowing the emotional undercurrent to remain expansive enough to feel shared. This dichotomy is particularly prevalent in this is how a woman leaves, where she reflects candidly on her marriage and documents the painful, necessary and often quiet process of choosing self-preservation over staying. Even she questioned whether such vulnerability was too much to offer, “I've written songs that are so specifically about my situation. I was just thinking, I have a song on this record called this is how a woman leaves, and it was almost like, 'is this too much? Do I need to just keep this for me and not put this on this album? Is anyone gonna understand this?’” However, she soon realised that creating a connection, rather than removing personal emotion, deepens the connection with listeners. “Because I was able to be vulnerable, it connects even deeper with people.” 

Privacy remains paramount for the singer-something she actively controls through clearly drawn boundaries in both her personal and professional life. She speaks with certainty about the decision to keep her child entirely off social media, a choice she describes as deeply grounding. “I just want him to be a kid,” she tells me. “So that takes a lot of stress off of me and my conscience.” Now in her thirties, that same instinct for self-preservation has sharpened her approach to relationships. She is, by her own admission, “pretty boundaried” with friends, collaborators and partners alike. The exception is in the writing room. There, surrounded by trusted friends and longtime creative partners who know her history in full, the guard comes down. It becomes a space to unravel, to process, to tell the truth without consequence. Still, she is keenly aware that vulnerability does not equal obligation. “I don't censor myself in a co-write,” she says. “It's my decision whether or not anyone hears it [laughs]. I can't have that lock on my heart when I'm writing the song that day, because you just have to sort of leave the ego out of it, even if it's painful. We got some songs that were far too vulnerable and painful for the public to hear, but I'm still glad that I wrote them. So it's a choice. It's a conscious effort to protect myself, protect my family and not air everything just out of anger.” The openness exists for the sake of the work, not the audience. Her discipline feels almost radical: a reminder that intimacy is most powerful when it is chosen, not extracted, and that protecting ones inner life can be its own quiet form of rebellion. As she puts it: “I never really have a set concept… I'm just like a messy feel it all, write it all, good, bad and ugly, walk of shame to redemption [laughs], all of it's there.”

Morris understands however, that many fans engage with her music without any real knowledge of her personal life, and that intimacy doesn’t require context. “People don't care if it's like some weird lyric about something only you could have remembered,” she notes. “I think it's just about the emotion of the song and the vocal performance.” In resisting spectacle and blame, Morris finds something more enduring: a body of work that trusts listeners to meet her in the truth. The result is an album that doesn’t ask to be decoded, only felt. And in that restraint, it lands with devastating clarity. 

D R E A M S I C L E pushes up against the boundaries of genre, existing within a primarily pop realm that weaves in threads of folk-pop, country and Americana. The albums palette, Morris tells me, wasn’t premeditated so much as surrendered to. She opened herself up creatively and let collaboration lead the way. “Everyone was really bringing in their own vibe of what we would create,” she recalls. “They'd adapt to me in the room when we wrote, and I didn't have like an idea of, 'oh, this is gonna be the producer for this project.’ I kind of just wanna write with everyone and just pull these songs together and if it feels like a mess, or there's no cohesion, I will deal with that later. I just want to be in these rooms.” That openness extended beyond the studio itself. The recording process becomes a refuge away from home, with Morris travelling to Los Angeles several times to write and record outside of Nashville - distance she felt she needed for her own sanity. “I was like, 'I can't be home right now. It's too depressing… I think I was just trying to get out of Nashville to write a lot of this.” Along the way, she reunited with close friends and collaborators like Julia Michaels - whom she calls “the best” - and worked in New York City with Jack Antonoff for the first time. D R E A M S I C L E also marks her most producer-heavy project yet, tapping Evan Blair, Joel Little, Naomi McPherson, The Monsters & Strangerz, Greg Kurstin, Jimmy Robbins, John Ryan and Morris herself. “You're writing with people and they end up being the producer of the song that you all created together. So there is a lot of genre bending and blending with this album, but I feel like each time I make a record, it's always sort of doing that anyways. It's just getting sharper each time.” Morris tells me of the tiring and repetitive nature of existing within one genre. Having spent most of her career as a Country music star, pop and other genres have always been embedded within her artistic DNA. “As a vocalist, I crave doing differences in each song. That's just kind of like how it comes out, it's just a little bit of everything… sticking to one thing and I don't know, I just love to sing. So singing one type of vibe for thirteen songs or however many songs, when I imagine listening to it and approving mixes and taking it to the stage for the tour, like I would get a little bit bored.” 

In motion and in flux, D R E A M S I C L E captures an artist choosing growth over comfort. Whilst she will never turn her back on the genre that built her, she reflects upon the careers of her favourite artists, noting that the key to a long and creatively fulfilling career is existing within a constant evolving state. “You'll always have your compass and like your niche. But I think the magic of artists with longevity that I'm inspired by just expand upon their very special, unique thing as the years go by and they never lose it. It's not like a full reinvention. I think it's just someone polishing up each time, their very unique talent. It's cool to see artists that do that. It keeps it fresh and keeps it interesting.”

This past Thursday evening, Morris launched the Australian leg of her D R E A M S I C L E world tour, a moment made even sweeter by the turbulence that preceded it in the past weeks. The road back to Australia was anything but smooth: just days earlier an ice storm hit Nashville, leaving her unable to travel to Australia and forcing the cancellation of the Perth and Brisbane shows - dates she hopes to reschedule. “It was very crazy,” she notes. “But we're safe. Our power just came back on. It was a very long 10 days… it was just this complete unprecedented shit show storm that knocked all the trees and power lines down.” Morris last toured Australia in 2018 supporting Niall Horan, making this return not overdue but also a career landmark - her first headline tour on Australian soil. It’s a milestone she wears proudly, one that will see her perform in venues that mirror the emotional intimacy of the record. “We just finished soundcheck here at the Forum here in Melbourne and this theatre is beautiful. So it's gonna be a very cozy twinkly evening.” She went on to tease a cover of a song from one of her favourite Australian artists, which has been revealed as Natalie Imbruglia’s Torn. What she promises is not just a concert, but a carefully curated emotional arc - one that traverses heartache and joy before settling somewhere gentler. “When I make a set list or when I make a track list, I'm thinking about this emotional arc and I want to leave the listener and myself in a place of relief and peace by the end of this final song.” By the final song, Morris aims to leave both herself and her audience feeling lighter. It’s an evening designed to feel lived-in and luminous, heavy with feeling but never weighed down by it. “It’s definitely a really emotional show, but it's not so heavy that you're gonna feel like, 'oh my God, what a downer.' You are really taken on a journey. But it's a lot of fun too. My band is just so incredible to watch and listen to - they're just so high caliber. I feel like my job is easy [laughs].” In the end, the overall D R E A M S I C L E experience is about the catharsis of finally arriving, and the quiet power of choosing warmth, connection and joy. 

There is a kind of alchemy that only exists in live performance; the instant enhance of energy between artist and audience that no streaming platform can replicate. Releasing music into the world is, by nature, a delayed conversation. Fans respond through comments, posts and moments of connection that happen far from the artists view. Live shows, however, abolish that distance. They offer something immediate and unfiltered, allowing artists to witness in real time how their art lands, lingers and lives in the bodies of others, It is this rare immediacy that prompted my question to Morris: has she been surprised by which songs from D R E A M S I C L E have resonated most deeply with audiences so far? “It changes depending on the city you're in, or the country you're in,” she responds. “But I feel like the song Lemonade in the show is a really fun moment. People sing it so loud. In the middle of the tour, we were like, 'we need to create more of a moment for this,' because the fans are singing it so loudly. When the tour started last year, I ended up putting out these bonus tracks on the deluxe and be a bitch has been a really fun song, very cathartic [laughs] for the singles or just anyone who has been ghosted before. That feels like a moment in the show. this is how a woman leaves is really emotional. D R E A M S I C L E, it just changes each time. I'm excited to see what the Australian and New Zealand fans gravitate towards in the set.”

Whilst Morris remains immersed in the world of D R E A M S I C L E, she revealed last week on social media that she has already returned to the studio, quietly laying the groundwork for what comes next. As our conversation draws to a close, I ask how the process of creating her latest record has reshaped her artistry, and how that evolution might carry forward into her future work. She responds: “Each album is so different and has documented like crazy changes of my life. My first record was just complete freedom. There was no criticism or bar set yet. We didn't know what we were doing. We were just having fun and it ended up working. Then my second record was just sort of like anxiety of it not meeting the precedent set by the previous. Even though I had some big songs from that record, I would never wanna be in that position again of like sophomore slump and like the anxiety of trying to like beat your first one. Each album, I guess, depending on what I've absorbed from life and wisdom, and then also who I'm writing with - because I write with a lot of the same people that I love and trust, but our friendships evolve and so therefore our songs will. I think I try to be honest and not too self-righteous or earnest. I never want it to feel false in any way. So even when I can go from a song like The Middle and The Bones, into these like My Church moments or something way more stripped back like D R E A M S I C L E  or grand bouquet I think the common thread is it's my voice, well, first off. I'm not super esoteric as a songwriter. I like being able to paint a clear picture, but I think obviously I have a writing style that is unique to me and it just gets more... I guess the bullseye moves, but I think that I hit it closer and closer each record.”

MILKY EXCLUSIVE COVER STORY ©

Writer: Vasili Papathanasopoulos

Photography: Kirt Barnett

Creative: Emily Pierce

Make Up: Melissa Hurkman

Hair: Laura Polko

D R E A M S I C L E is out now. Final tickets to Maren Morris' Sydney show are on sale now.