Maren Morris dishes on returning to touring — and ‘all those crazy things in my tweet’
There’s plenty of topical conversation to be had with Maren Morris right now, what with her first big amphitheater tour as a headliner looming, and it being her first tour since the pandemic started, and that being the first tour on which she’ll tote her young son — Hayes, who turned 2 in March.
Before diving into anything related to the 32-year-old country star’s upcoming concert plans, though, there’s another musical thing on her to-do list worth some discussion.
Musical being the operative word here.
Last Sunday, Morris — who’ll bring her “Humble Quest” tour to Charlotte Metro Credit Union Amphitheatre on June 16 — threatened to break Twitter when she announced out of the blue that she was planning to send in an audition tape to try to land a role in the Broadway musical “Wicked.” Good Morning America, People, Yahoo! and a variety of country- and Broadway-related websites quickly wrote stories about her revelation. But none of them actually spoke with her directly about her plans.
So, we felt obligated to.
“I haven’t filmed it yet. I really want to prepare,” the diminutive singer with the huge (and incredible) voice told The Charlotte Observer in a Zoom interview on Friday. “I have been relentlessly researching it, and ... reading the script has been so wonderful and eye-opening. There are all these little nuances and moments. So I definitely want to try. I really do want to try and see what happens. Maybe they’ll say no, maybe I’ll get a callback. I don’t know how it works when you send a video audition in. But yeah, I mean, it’s like worth a shot, right?”
Morris, who previously has said she’s wanted to perform on Broadway since she was a young girl, added that she’s been obsessed since she was 14 with the musical that imagines how a green-skinned girl named Elphaba became the Wicked Witch of the West from “The Wizard of Oz.”
As for any suggestion that she might get a leg up with “Wicked” because of her fame, the Grammy Award-winning artist said she sure hopes it doesn’t.
“I don’t want anything given to me, or handed to me,” Morris explained. “I want to be able to show my chops and have them really weigh the auditionees that I’ll be sending in with.”
In our interview, Morris elaborated on her growing openness to try new things, recalled being “terrified” at her first concert in Charlotte and explained why her connection to her 2020 crossover hit “The Bones” grew stronger over the course of the pandemic. (The conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and brevity.)
Q. In your tweets about “Wicked,” you mentioned being “into taking things head-on,” and not being afraid to “chase your weird dreams.” Have you always been this way, or do you think the pandemic pushed you to not hold back on stuff?
I mean, I wouldn’t say I have this characteristic of being this thrill-seeker. I’m a pretty shy person. At the same time, I’m in a very public-facing line of work. I play songs for thousands of people. So it’s a weird oxymoron, I suppose. But yeah, I would say maybe the pandemic made me feel fearless. Maybe it was being cooped up for too long with an infant in quarantine for months and months.
But all those crazy things I mentioned in my tweet, I was like, I don’t know what there is to fear anymore. Because I’ve had my job sort of taken from me for two years, I’ve been through a lot of peaks and valleys emotionally. So I was like, the worst that could happen if I sent this audition in is they say no.
I’m starting to — I don’t know, for lack of a better term — give less of a (expletive) about my fear of things, and just do it. And then, if I don’t get it, move on.
Q. Speaking of being cooped up with an infant: Your son Hayes (her first child with husband and fellow country singer Ryan Hurd) is now a toddler, and this will be your first time going out on tour as a mom. Are you anxious about that?
Bringing my son out with me this summer doesn’t really give me anxiety. I’m just excited and relieved that I don’t have to be away from him. But I always have anxiety going into tours that I’m the headliner on, because everything’s on your shoulders.
After I did my “Girl” tour a few years ago, I did a couple weekends opening for Miranda Lambert and I had the most fun, because I was like, “Oh my God, this is so easy. I just play for an hour, and then the rest of my night is my own.” It’s no pressure. When you’re the headliner on the marquee, every night, I always have anxiety. I’m like, “Oh my God, no one’s gonna show up!”
But it’s a good amount of butterflies this time around. It’s not crippling anxiety like it was before. I’ve chilled out a little bit more this time around. And once I get on stage, that all melts away and you can just lose yourself in the songs.
Q. I think you’re gonna like the venue that you’re headlining here in Charlotte. It’s a 5,000-seat amphitheater that’s right on the edge of uptown, so the skyline’s right there. I know a few times you’ve opened PNC Music Pavilion, which is kind of nondescript — almost like being in the middle of a parking lot. But you’ve also played shows at Coyote Joe’s. What do you remember about performing there?
I remember the first show show I did, where I had to for the first time use in-ear monitors — because I’d only been on wedges before that — was when I opened for Sam Hunt at Coyote Joe’s back in 2015. (By wedges, she means a stage monitor system that allowed her to hear her voice in the monitor in front of her.) And I was terrified, because when you have in-ear monitors, you’re just not used to hearing yourself that way yet. Now I can’t live without them, but yeah, that was just a scary show because I didn’t know if I could even hear myself. I know I’ve done rounds there, too, with Jon Pardi, for the radio station.
I’m excited to play this new — well, new for me — venue (Charlotte Metro Credit Union Amphitheatre), because it just sounds beautiful. And we’re doing a handful of North Carolina shows on that first run, so you guys are gonna get the first few shows out of us, and those are so fun because you’re still working things out, you’re figuring out the chemistry of the songs within each other, of the setlist, and so y’all kinda get to be the guinea pigs.
But I’m so excited ’cause we’re gonna be so breathless going back out finally, and it being our crowd, after two years of not being able to do so. It’s gonna feel so fresh.
Q. Do you feel most at home — most connected to your fans and the music — in a bigger venue or in a smaller venue?
It depends I guess on the year. I’ve played some magical shows at amphitheaters. I haven’t really gotten to headline them before, but as an opener I’ve had really fun shows at them. I think it’ll be fun this time around because when I go on, it’ll be dark. We’ll have the stars, and we’ll have all the lighting really pop at that time of day. So that’s gonna be fun.
I’ve also had really emotional moments playing when I was opening for Sam at Madison Square Garden. I had never played that venue before. Everyone was singing “My Church” back to me, and it was just — you know, I get choked up very easily. But yeah, I’ve had some really emotional moments on stage at any kind of venue. Because you come back to reality for a moment and you’re like, “Oh, whoa. I cannot believe that people know this song.”
I’m sure I’ll shed many tears on this tour being so thankful to be back.
Q. When you performed “The Bones” for NPR during its “Tiny Desk” concert series recently, you talked about how the song “means so much more to me nowadays than it did even the day I wrote it.” Can you elaborate on that?
It’s always been an emotional song for me, because I wrote it about my husband. But I wrote it when we were newly engaged. So it started out as this promise to him, in almost a vow sort of way — like, even when times are tough, we’re gonna be in the trenches together, and we’re gonna make it through. The foundation is strong.
Then there’s this cool thing about certain songs when they hit a certain time period. “The Bones” in particular really transformed in the pandemic. It went No. 1 in spring of 2020. So, just such a strange time to be celebrating but also not being able to really go out and celebrate a song like that, because we were all quarantining.
But I had so many people reach out to me — fans on Instagram, Twitter, whatnot, saying that the meaning behind that song grew into almost a worldly sense. Like, “The house don’t fall when the bones are good,“ “We’re in the homestretch of the hard times.” It kind of felt like it was narrating the pandemic. Even though I wrote it back in 2018 or 2017.
It’s crazy how songs can take on another life, and an even more worldly meaning. Obviously we didn’t write it thinking that it would go No. 1 during a pandemic, but I think it made it even more emotional for me to sing now, because it reached that many people during such a tough time, and helped in some way.
Q. Are there specific stories you’ve heard about people connecting with “The Bones” in deep ways that stand out to you?
There’ve been a handful that have made me emotional. Definitely people talking about their relationships and how that song brought them even closer, and so they wanted it to be their wedding song, or what have you. And during the pandemic, especially on TikTok, I remember seeing people put that song as a soundtrack of them taking extra shifts to be able to just survive the month.
I mean, it’s crazy, because it’s this weird byproduct of me just sharing a story. You can’t plan for that to be the reaction. But it’s such a beautiful cause and effect of writing from the most honest place you can, that people will fill their own memories and experiences into something that you wrote — 3-1/2 minutes of your own story.
That is the crazy thing about music, and I don’t think anything else in this world can really touch it, in that regard. Like, you could see a film, and be really touched. But trying to imagine a movie with no music underscoring it, it doesn’t hit the same. So I do think that it’s a particularly magical element of living on earth, being able to experience those magical vibrations. And in a live-music setting, being able to connect with a thousand other strangers for two hours or three hours.
To go home feeling a little bit closer to the human race is good for the soul. We need more of it, after two years of being so isolated.
Where to see Maren Morris
What: “The Humble Quest Tour,” in support of her third album, “Humble Quest,” which was released March 25. Brent Cobb will open.
When: 8 p.m. Thursday, June 16.
Where: Charlotte Metro Credit Union Amphitheatre, 1000 NC Music Factory Blvd.
Tickets: $23 for lawn seats; $60 and up for reserved seats.
Details: www.livenation.com.
Other NC dates: June 9 at Red Hat Amphitheater in Raleigh, and June 17 at Live Oak Bank Pavilion in Wilmington.
This story was originally published May 7, 2022 at 3:19 PM.
