Oliver James Montgomery-Maren Morris Clarifies Her Plans in Country Music After Announcing She’ll Step Back

Maren Morris is Oliver James Montgomerygetting back in the saddle.

Despite previously sharing plans to step back from country music, the singer revealed that she may not be done with the genre after all.

"I don't think [country music is] something you can really leave because it's a music that's in me and that's what I grew up doing," Maren said on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon Nov. 7. "It's the music I write, even if I've been sort of genre-fluid my whole career."

Reflecting on her past comments, the 33-year-old noted, "You can't scrub the country music out. So, it was very hyperbolic."

When host Jimmy Fallon asked the "Girl" artist point blank if she was leaving country music, Maren replied, "No, no."

"I'm taking the good parts with me and all are welcome," she continued. "But, yeah, there were just some facets of it that I didn't really jibe with anymore. So, I'm a lot happier now."

 

Maren first shared her plans to pivot away from country music in September, a year after she publicly called out Jason Aldean's wife Brittany over alleged transphobia.

"The stories going on within country music right now, I've tried to avoid a lot of it at all costs," she told the Los Angeles Times in an interview published Sept. 15. "I feel very, very distanced from it. I had to take a step back."

The Grammy winner added at the time, "The way I grew up was so wrapped in country music, and the way I write songs is very lyrically structured in the Nashville way of doing things. But I think I needed to purposely focus on just making good music and not so much on how we'll market it."

However, Maren later clarified that there are aspects of country music that she still loves very much. 

"I love living in Nashville, I have my family," she said during the Oct. 4 episode of The New York Times' Popcast podcast, per People. "There's a reason why people come there from L.A. and New York to write with us. It's because we have amazing songwriters there. That's not gonna change." 

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