Maren Morris Is Happy With Where She’s Landed: ‘I Feel Vindicated’

There’s something familiar about Maren Morris ’s East Nashville living room. Maybe it’s the wood-paneled walls, or the gorgeous upright piano with its gilded exposed innards that evokes an old organ, or the two stained-glass windows that refract slices of tinted light. It feels, to be honest, kind of like church.

“A little bit on the nose, huh,” Morris says with a laugh. A decade ago, she released her breakout single “My Church” from her debut album Hero , and she’s rolling with the metaphors. This cabin-like home she shares with her son Hayes has become her sanctuary, and, in a few weeks, she’ll be playing a Hero 10th anniversary show at the Ryman Auditorium, i.e. the “Mother Church of Country Music .” “I’ll lean into it,” Morris adds, sitting down on a tan leather couch in a pair of jeans, a black tank, and silver band around her bicep. “Sometimes you just have to. But it’s the perfect place to enshrine the memory of what we started.”

It’s a quiet morning in the neighborhood, on a wooded street filled not with giant showy mansions but family houses, roaming deer, and towering trees. It is a beautiful and airy place, like real people live here: a small playscape in the yard with a slide and swings, little shoes by the door, and a Dachshund that insists on sitting as close as possible to a human leg. “He’s Velcro,” Morris says, after several failed attempts to discourage him from the couch (and my lap).

Moving to this house has been a returning for Morris, and she isn’t afraid of going back. Her life right now is big on both reflection and new beginnings. Morris bought the home from Jess Busbee, the wife of her late producer and friend Michael Busbee, a.k.a. busbee , who died in 2019 after battling an aggressive brain cancer. That piano by the door was his, and they wrote her song “80s Mercedes” on it. Now a photo of Morris, in a white fur jacket hugging busbee, sits on the mantel next to a collection of awards and a Wheaties box with her face on it. It’s not always easy to be confronted with his memory, but she welcomes it. She’s good with sitting in discomfort. Editor’s picks The 250 Greatest Albums of the 21st Century So Far The 100 Best TV Episodes of All Time The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time 100 Best Movies of the 21st Century

When Jess Busbee moved to Nashville after her husband died, this was their “healing house.” Now it’s Morris’s. “It’s this ten-year evolution of full circle moments,” Morris says, who divorced her ex, artist Ryan Hurd, in 2024. “It was the perfect place for me and Hayes to start over.”

When Morris moved to Nashville from Arlington, Texas, in 2013, she lived here on the East Side, across the river from Music Row where most of the mainstream country music action happened. Rents were cheaper, and it’s where artists and creative people gravitated: “ East Nashville ” was almost more emblematic of a cultural divide than a physical one. Over the years, as those once-struggling artists like Morris found their way to the main stages, that’s shifted. “There’s less writing in the publishing houses, and everyone has a home studio over here,” Morris says.