Maren Morris’ latest album Humble Quest is nominated for Album of the Year at the upcoming Country Music Awards on Nov. 9. Despite the high honor, Morris isn’t sure she will actually attend the ceremony.
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The driving force behind Morris’ potential absence is the Twitter feud she got into with Brittany Aldean (Jason Aldean’s wife) last month. Aldean posted a picture of herself when she was younger in her “tomboy phase” along with the caption, “I’d really like to thank my parents for not changing my gender when I went through my tomboy phase. I love this girly life.”
Morris, among others, responded to the post with, “It’s so easy to, like, not be a scumbag human? Sell your clip-ins and zip it, Insurrection Barbie.”
Soon after, Morris became public enemy No. 1 among Fox News contributors and anti-LGBTQ+ groups. Despite taking the criticism in stride, Morris has since expressed that she doesn’t feel she will be comfortable going to the CMAs.
In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Morris said, “I’m very honored that my record is nominated. But I don’t know if I feel [at] home there right now.”
She continued, “So many people I love will be in that room, and maybe I’ll make a game-time decision and go. But as of right now, I don’t feel comfortable going. I kind of feel peaceful at the notion of not going.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Morris commented on the culture of hate speech she feels has “always sort of been there” in country music. She said she hates to be the “hall monitor of treating people like human beings in country music. It’s exhausting … But there’s a very insidious culture of people feeling very comfortable being transphobic and homophobic and racist, and that they can wrap it in a joke and no one will ever call them out for it. It just becomes normal for people to behave like that.”
Morris continued, “I feel like it got worse during [former president] Trump—which are all the years that I’ve been on a major label and active, since 2016. That’s when everything got worse—irreparable, almost.”
Morris also spoke directly to the Aldean drama saying she has a hard time accepting, “humans being made fun of for questioning their identity, especially kids.”
Since the Aldean fight, Morris has raised more than $150,000 for Trans lifeline and GLAAD’s Transgender Media Program with a t-shirt that co-opted Fox Contributor Tucker Carlson’s comments calling her a “Lunatic Country Music Person.” Aldean added more fuel to the fire by releasing her own merch with “Don’t tread on our kids” written in Barbie font.
Photo by Harper Smith / Courtesy Sony Music
