At Megan Moroney’s sold-out show at Radio City Music Hall last Wednesday, a group of four preteen friends seated behind me were locked in.
As Moroney skipped across the stage singing about boys, heartache, and self-esteem, the friends, all dressed to match the star in cobalt blue and white cowboy boots, clutched each other and sang the lyrics at the top of their lungs. They posed for selfie videos and countless pics. At one point they swayed in a giant four-way hug, screaming along to “The Girls,” Moroney’s ode to female friendship. They were, in that moment, the epitome of the song.
It’s the type of moment that Moroney, 27, envisioned when plotting out her 50-date Am I Okay? tour, which kicked off last month. The country star, who released her sophomore album of the same name last year, wants fans of her music to embrace all parts of themselves, the good and the ugly. That’s what she does through her songs, which she describes as half “emo cowgirl” half “bad bitch.”
“I just want my fans to know, which I think they do, that I love to dress up and stuff, but my songwriting and my lyrics have a lot of layers,” she tells me. “It’s okay that sometimes you feel sad and then the next thing, you’re fine.”
The Megan Moroney that greets me at the restaurant of the Four Seasons hotel in Manhattan a few days before the concert looks nothing like the girl on the stage. Gone are the, as she puts it,
“10 pounds” of blonde hair she wears for performing, the bold glam and the babydoll dresses. Instead, Moroney’s dressed casually in a baseball hat and jacket from the viral brand Boys Lie, the only indication of her other self a manicure in her signature cobalt blue.
“This is songwriter Megan,” she tells me of her current look. “I always say that there’s a stage Megan and there’s songwriting Megan. On stage, though, I think people would get bored with an outfit like this.”
Moroney once thought she’d maybe pursue a career in digital marketing and got her degree in it from the University of Georgia. She instead poured her knowledge into giving each of her albums a distinct look and color scheme; the blue is Am I Okay?’s official hue (her first album, Lucky, was green). It’s become so associated with her that fans tell her about Lululemon leggings they found in “Megan blue,” and the branding is indicative of how meticulous Moroney is when it comes to her career.
As a young girl from Georgia who grew up harmonizing with her dad and brother in her living room, Moroney couldn’t picture herself as a country superstar. In college she ended up performing for the first time basically by accident, and she worked as an influencer to pay the bills. But since moving to Nashville to pursue music full time in 2020, her star has taken off, leading to a number one song (“Tennessee Orange”), two albums, and now, her third headline tour. And Moroney has her foot on the gas.
“My career is kind of my whole life at this point,” she says. “It used to be a hobby. I was going to be an accountant growing up, but now I do this and it’s my entire life and I love it.”
Moroney is serious about the accountant thing. Growing up in Georgia, music was a fun passion project, but nothing else. Her father was devoted to music as a hobby, teaching her to listen to lyrics and performing with her and her brother in their living room, but that was as far as it went for him. In high school she hurt her knee and was stuck in a wheelchair for two months. The boredom was the push she needed to learn to play the guitar, which she could prop on the side of her chair.
“There was nothing else to do. I was just sitting around and I was like, okay, fine,” she says.
When Moroney enrolled at the University of Georgia, she says she had no idea what she wanted to do with her life, at one point considering sports broadcasting or again, accounting. She dove right into campus life, rushing a sorority, Kappa Delta, and making lifelong friends. When she was a freshman, her sorority hosted a philanthropy event and paid country singer Jon Langston to perform. Since hiring him blew their entire budget, her Kappa sisters asked if Moroney would consider opening for him because she’d posted videos of her singing with her dad on Instagram.
Moroney opened the show, singing covers in front of her friends and a few guests. One of those guests just happened to be country singer Chase Rice, who approached her after the show.
“He was like, ‘Why don’t you open for me next month?’” she says, noting that he also encouraged her to bring along some of her sisters to the show. “He was like, ‘The only thing is that you have to write a song.’”
Moroney hadn’t ever attempted to write a song, but soon found it came easily to her. She describes herself as “emotional and sensitive” (she’s a Libra), and the lyrics poured out of her. She performed an original song to open for Rice, and everything changed.
“I was like, Well, this is what I’m going to do with my life. I don’t know how I’m going to figure it out, but I will,” she says.
Still, she took things slowly. She finished her degree and moved to Nashville during the pandemic in 2020, figuring that if she just ended up working in music marketing, that would be great too.
“I wasn’t like, I’m going to be this country music superstar,” she says. “My brain just never went there. It was just like, I know that my plan after college is to move to Nashville.”
She supported herself by working as an influencer, which began in college. After realizing they were gaining followers by posting about their football game-day outfits and other parts of campus life, Moroney and some of her other friends began to lean into it.
“It started with us just getting free stuff and we were like, Duh, I don’t want to have to pay for clothes. I’m broke,” she says.
By the time she moved to Nashville, Moroney was making money from brand deals with companies like Bud Light.
“I think a lot of people didn’t take me seriously when I moved to Nashville because when they would go to my Instagram, I’d be like, I just wrote this song, and then the next post would use my code for 20% off. It’s like, What is this girl doing?” she jokes. But she realized that it was a good way to pay the bills.
“I feel like not having to be, like, a bartender from 9:00 p.m. to 3:00 a.m., it allowed me to have the mental space to be able to write and get better,” she says. “I don’t think I could do that if I was exhausted from working night shifts…I would just be useless probably.”
Once she got to Nashville, her career began to take off. Songwriting continued to come naturally to her. In fact, she wrote her first hit, “Wonder,” after a conversation with her best friend, Natalie, at the beach.
“She was fighting with this dude and I was like, if he really loved you and cared about you, you wouldn’t be wondering if he did,” she says. “I had a margarita in hand. I walked down the beach. I didn’t even write the song on a guitar. I wrote it, like, a capella, just out loud, literally in the ocean with the margarita in my hand.” She later posted the song to TikTok, where it went viral, her first song to hit the zeitgeist.
“I was just in my car singing it and everyone liked it,” she says. “And then when I put that out, the reaction to that, I was like, okay, I think something here is interesting.”
Her debut single, “Tennessee Orange” had similar kismet. She had been asked to participate in a Spotify “fresh finds” campaign for independent artists, and rushed to record the song. Moroney had a hunch that releasing the single, which is about liking a guy so much you’re willing to wear his team’s colors during football season, could be a hit. But even she was surprised by how big the song became.
“You don’t know when things are going to happen,” she says. “You don’t know why people gravitate toward certain things. I would’ve never predicted ‘Tennessee Orange’ to be the song.”
If Moroney is still amazed at some of the twists and turns her career has taken and her meteoric rise, her fans are right there with her. Amid the sea of excited, chattering girls dressed in blue, bows, and boots, I heard several exclaim that they couldn’t believe how many people had shown up to see Moroney since the last concert of hers they had attended.
Moroney admits that there’s a little more pressure now that so many people are listening to her innermost thoughts, but knows that being honest in her lyrics is the best way to connect with the fans that have supported her since day one.
“My fans, as long as I'm being honest and I’m writing about real stuff and I’m doing what I’ve done in the past, I think they’re going to like it,” she says.
It’s clear that her honesty resonates. The crowd at the concert had an early Taylor Swift vibe, in that it was a room packed with girls screaming their hearts out over their myriad of deep, all-encompassing feelings. And Moroney is right there with them.
“Honestly when I see my fans in bars, we just take shots together and it’s normal,” she says. “They’ll freak out for a second, but then they’re like, Wait, she’s fucking cool. We’re friends. That’s the vibes. I always get asked, Are you reading my diary? I think that is just because of my honest songwriting; they’ve been in the same shoes I’ve been in, so they feel connected to me in that way.”
It’s a connection that she doesn’t take for granted. Moroney takes time to thank the crowd several times during the night, and tells me she only wants to keep growing from here. She’s already working on her third album, which she wants to release “as soon as it’s done,” and play bigger venues so even more of her fans can come.
“I’m just going to keep playing shows and keep doing this until I can’t anymore,” she says.
