Maren Morris, Variety’s Changemaker of the Year, on Giving Voice to a Social Conscience in Country: ‘I Just Got So Sick of Being a Yes Person’

variety.com:

Natalie Weiner Reports of Maren Morris leaving country music have been greatly exaggerated. “You don’t fight for what you don’t love,” says Morris over Zoom during a chat from her Nashville home, squeezed in while her son Hayes is taking a nap. “I do all of this because I want it to be better for everybody, not just for the few.” Morris is not going anywhere — not leaving Nashville, not stopping her mission to make the music industry more fair, and definitely not leaving her Texas country roots to become a “pop star,” as she puts it. “Obviously no — like, that’s hilarious.” Her Variety Hitmakers award for Changemaker of the Year arrives after years of Morris using her success within country music to try to push the genre towards more inclusivity on all fronts — most pressingly, for people of color and the LGBTQ+ community.

That push has meant being at odds with some of country music’s most visible stars, and becoming a loud progressive voice on Nashville’s conservative-skewing political spectrum: Not looking the other way when Morgan Wallen used a racial slur, or when Jason Aldean’s wife Brittany posted an arguably transphobic joke on Instagram landed the 33-year-old singer-songwriter in the middle of a countrified version of the culture wars.

She was hardly ready to make nice when Tucker Carlson, then still in command of his Fox News bully pulpit, called her a “lunatic country music person,” which led to her branding that on an official T-shirt as a fundraiser, and a new name for her fans, “the Lunatics.” “I don’t think of myself as this badass or anything; I just got so sick of being a yes person to get ahead,” says Morris. “I’ve been successful, but — I think — at a moral cost.