Happy Hour
In which we spend 60 minutes with your faves, doing what makes them happiest.
If you look closely, you can see that Maren Morris has a tiny, fine-line tattoo of a martini glass on her right forearm. Within minutes of sitting down beside me, she shrugs up a sleeve of her blazer to show me her ink. It’s a proclamation of love for her favorite cocktail, which she prefers dirty, somewhere between the taste of nail-polish remover and “a sodium bomb that’s straight olive juice; cloudy as hell.”
But on this Tuesday afternoon, tucked away in a corner of the Bowery Hotel’s Gemma restaurant, the musician opts for a glass of white wine — mostly because she’s been in full glam since 5 a.m., flitting about the New York press circuit, stopping first at CBS Mornings to chat with Gayle King, then heading over to Watch What Happens Live with Andy Cohen. I offer her a sip of my dirty martini, and she swishes it around, thinking for a moment. “Oh, that’s good. It’s even-keeled, very balanced,” she says. “You can’t really taste the alcohol … Makes it easier to pretend it’s Friday.”
Jazz is piping through the trattoria, though the restaurant’s rustic warmth ironically brings to mind a saloon. Thick wooden beams hang above us, slivers of winter sun glint off the walnut bar — and I can’t help but think it could’ve been copy-pasted from any of the dives lining Tennessee’s Music Row. Morris, a Texas native and longtime Nashville resident, criss-crosses her legs, pulls her Nikes up onto the booth, and squares her shoulders to me. “I feel like we’re going to heal a lot of trauma,” she says, smiling. She flicks her hair behind her shoulders, readying herself to gab as though it were a contact sport.
The country singer turned pop artist is referring to her fourth studio album, Dreamsicle, her first full-length release since her divorce. In 2023, Morris separated from the father of her child, fellow singer-songwriter Ryan Hurd. The split was finalized by January 2024, but the aftermath rippled out into her recording studio, her evolving sexuality, the tabloids, the home they were renovating together. Yet Morris doesn’t consider Dreamsicle her official entry into the age of divorce canon. “It’s actually, to me, what happens after divorce,” she says. “I’m not documenting what happened during the relationship; I’m documenting the grief, anger, and sadness that follows, and the vulnerability of putting yourself back out there again … of reconnecting with your female friends and yourself.”
While the album is a vehicle for some of Morris’ more pleasure-seeking and impulsive emotions — her oceanic bisexual desire in the MUNA collaboration “Push Me Over” and jealousy in the ‘80s track “Cry in the Car” — it also chronicles the 34-year-old’s path to accountability. “Divorce is a failure: It’s a punishment, it’s a bitch, but it’s also a gift,” she says. “You’re always going to be the end-er or the bad guy in someone’s story, and you don’t have that much time here. So you have to ask yourself: What is keeping you up at night? Is it this? Then just fucking do it.” Sure, plenty of Dreamsicle lyrics engage the petty prickle of a woman scorned (“Bitch, you still owe me rent” or “I was always too good for your ass anyway”), but none of it was meant to sound intentionally malicious. “I would never put out anything in the world to hurt someone,” she adds. “Ultimately, I just wanted to make music that heals whatever the fuck I went through.”
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Part of Morris’s healing journey involved reentering the dating pool and joining Raya — where she’s swiping through men and women whenever she’s not bogged down with work or co-parenting her 5-year-old. Even broaching the topic makes her shudder now: “I feel like a toddler at dating, all knock-kneed,” she says through giggles. Together, we bemoan the “new mutant strain of fake liberal men … who pose as progressive dudes on dating apps” (earlier this year, I fell victim to one, and Morris thanks TikTok for alerting her to their existence). She’s also learning therapy concepts like “maladaptive daydreaming, limerence, and avoidant attachment” from Gen Z, whom she credits for helping her to detect red flags early and often. But even an Aries woman with a bone to pick gets bamboozled every once in a while. Morris tells me she’s still licking her wounds after a would-be paramour introduced her to his friends and then “completely imploded.” “I’m kind of realizing, with men especially, that they know how to cosplay intimacy so well,” she says, before waving over our waiter: “Hey — can I order one more? Thank you!”
Morris’s earnest attempts at connection have proven a worthy artistic venture, though. They’ve been “good fodder for songs,” she says, winking. Her process of bumbling through hook-ups inspired the single “Bed No Breakfast,” and when I ask if the song is an ode to a particular fuckboy or -girl, she says, “I think, honestly, it’s like, Am I the fuckboy in this situation? Like, ‘Okay, after we’re done, please leave. Where is your Uber?’” Morris is aware that sounds brazen, but then again, this isn’t the same old Maren who’s been playing “raggedy-ass honky-tonks” since she was 11 or who called Brittany Aldean an “Insurrection Barbie” once in a Twitter rage (though she still stands “ten toes down” on that statement). “Maybe it’s motherhood and seeing everything through my inner child’s lens, but this isn’t ‘peacemaker me’ anymore,” she says. “Whoever I became — I mean, she’s tough as nails and always has been — but this is different. No one can fuck with me anymore.”
A buzzy glow starts to flower on our cheeks as we reminisce about our millennial adolescence and all the accoutrements that came with it: prepaid Nokia brick phones and AIM chat rooms and computer viruses that were maybe, definitely our fault. Gen Z may be allergic to all things cringe, Morris says, but her willingness to “experience things so vulnerably … to be embarrassing, and let it happen over and over again” is what I think makes her a great artist. Over the years, her frankness — onstage, in the pages of Playboy, in this semi-private corner booth at Gemma — has roped in scores of fans. That shamelessness has given us all access to the fireworks display of emotions crackling in her head, shifting from heartache and devastation to pride and back again. It’s what makes Morris “a hopeful romantic, not hopeless.”
We stage a quick impromptu photo shoot as the restaurant begins its dinner turnover. Morris blots her face with powder and makes sure her boobs are secured in place before kicking her Nikes behind her head and hoisting her wine glass, triumphantly, into the air. She offers a quick hug good-bye and disappears into that sorely needed bright afternoon, and I feel somehow ready to lovingly embarrass myself — in the name of romance or artistry — once more.
