ABCThere’s no denying that 2020’s been a hard year, even for the woman who’s now the reigning Female Vocalist for both the CMA and ACM.
While Maren Morris crafted “The Bones,” the winner this week for both CMA Song and Single of the Year, she admits creativity has been hard to come by in a year dominated by COVID-19, social issues, and the election.
“For me, it’s been sparse,” she reflects, “just because I’ve been a new mom, I’ve been off the road and… I haven’t had the mental bandwidth to write songs.”
Maren and husband Ryan Hurd welcomed their son Hayes on March 23, near the beginning of the pandemic, and it was months later before she knew she had something to say.
“After the [political] conventions,” she explains, “and just sort of entering this extremely polarized season of an election year, and just everything that happened during the summertime with the the riots and the protests, and… the murder of George Floyd, I felt like the few times I have written I really wanted to say something and not just phone it in and perch on the fence.”
“So I felt like the few times I’ve written, I’ve gotten some really real s***,” she observes.
Maren’s newest recording is a plea to work toward a better world.
“I’m happy that ‘Better Than We Found It’ was received with so much love, because it was given with love,” she says. “It wasn’t given as a hand slap or to say FU to all these people.”
“It was literally saying, pleading from a mother’s heart now, ‘Please, can we leave this better, just a little bit better for our kids?'” she continues. “So that’s kind of where my head’s been at in the writing space.”
By Stephen Hubbard
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