The Rise of Megan Moroney, Emo Cowgirl

“I don’t write a whole lot of love songs,” Megan Moroney said last month, onstage at Radio City Music Hall. Fortunately, that’s not exactly true. Almost all her songs are about love, although she sings mostly about coping with its absence, or its failure to be respectfully reciprocated by various dudes, including one who had a Chevrolet and a sneaky smoking habit, and who is now known, to millions of Moroney fans, as Noah. Moroney is a country singer, though not one who is unduly burdened by the genre’s venerable history, and she has honed her approach on a pair of delectable albums: “Lucky,” from 2023, and “Am I Okay?,” which arrived last summer, and which includes “Noah,” a song that builds to a plaintive confession. “Noah, you should know at night I think of you and me,” she sings. Not a depiction of romantic bliss, but a kind of love song all the same.

When Moroney arrived at Radio City, she was a week into her first big headlining tour, and things were going even better than she might have hoped. She had sold out back-to-back shows, and the venue’s velvety seats were packed with fans—many of them women with their friends, or girls with their guardians—who expressed their devotion to Moroney by drowning her out. Moroney’s songs, often written with collaborators, are full of artful and sometimes acidic depictions of heartache. She uses pithy phrases that evoke melancholy scenes: “Here you come again, who could it be? / It’s 3 A.M., no caller I.D.” But the atmosphere at the show was unremittingly jubilant—and so, in a way, was Moroney herself. She asked, “Is anybody ready to have the best night of their lives?” For some of the younger fans who hollered their agreement, this was probably no exaggeration.

Moroney gets great mileage out of the contrast between the achy-breaky songs she sings and the bright smile she loves to flash. At Radio City, nearly everything onstage seemed to have been bedazzled, including Moroney’s outfit, her microphone stand, and one of her guitars. “Third Time’s the Charm,” from her most recent album, captures the tentative joy of rekindling a love affair: “Tonight I’m layin’ in your arms / Prayin’ that the third time’s the charm.” After the first chorus, Moroney added a spoken update, telling the crowd, “The third time is not the charm, but that’s O.K.” In fact, Moroney has already written a sequel, “I’ll Be Fine,” which she included on a rereleased version of “Am I Okay?,” and which she performed later that night. On Instagram, she has explained that recording the song was difficult. She wrote, “I remember being in the studio, holding back tears, thinking, ‘How am I gonna sing this every night?’ ”

In 2023, when Moroney played a much smaller show at the downtown club Bowery Ballroom, she covered the Taylor Swift song “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together.” Doubtless this was a way of acknowledging a debt: Moroney is one of countless singers who have evidently profited from studying Swift’s talky, detail-oriented approach to songwriting. (Where Swift once sang, “She’s cheer captain, and I’m on the bleachers,” Moroney makes basically the same romantic comparison, only grownup and countrified, singing, “He found a beauty queen / I’m in a dive bar, drinkin’, while she’s in a magazine.”) But it was also a sign of Moroney’s ambition; her candidacy for stardom seemed plausible at Bowery Ballroom, and much more than plausible at Radio City. She has found some success on country radio: the title track on “Am I Okay?” recently entered the Top 10 on the Billboard Country Airplay chart. And the clubby country-music industry seems to like her. In November, she was named best new artist at the Country Music Association Awards, not to be confused with the Academy of Country Music Awards, which last month nominated her for female artist of the year and nominated “Am I Okay?” for album of the year. Of course, another lesson that Moroney might have learned from Swift is that, if your fans truly love you, you can leave country music and take them with you.

Before she was a rising star, Moroney had a modern sort of day job: she was an online influencer, scratching out a living from promotional videos. Her breakthrough hit, “Tennessee Orange,” was a masterpiece of viral marketing. The lyrics are about a woman who, like Moroney, comes from Georgia, but who is now wearing the colors of the University of Tennessee, because of a guy she recently met. Listeners were allowed, or, indeed, encouraged, to think that the guy in question was country’s leading man, Morgan Wallen, a native Tennessean. (Later, on the podcast “Call Her Daddy,” Moroney said, of Wallen, “We were friends for a long time. We were not just friends. And now we’re friends.”) The speculation gave Moroney two kinds of credibility at once: it linked her to an established star and also suggested that her lyrics reflected her real life.

One of Moroney’s guitar straps reads “EMO COWGIRL,” a self-description that has become something of a rallying cry—she sells T-shirts, sweatshirts, koozies, and Christmas ornaments emblazoned with the term. For Moroney, “emo” describes her lovesick sensibility rather than any commitment to the punk-inspired subgenre. But, in recent years, country and emo have in fact been drawing closer. One of Moroney’s guitarists, Riley Lowery, used to play with Dylan Marlowe, an emerging country singer whose great début album, “Mid-Twenties Crisis,” from 2024, opens with a song called “Heaven’s Sake,” which finds common ground between the sound of contemporary country radio and the sound of the Warped Tour in the two-thousands. The album’s lead single, “Boys Back Home,” recently hit No. 2 on the country chart. Far from country radio, Marlowe can also be heard on “EMPTYHANDED,” a riotous collaboration with Johnny Franck, a singer and guitarist who performs as Bilmuri (pronounced like the actor). Franck once played with the punkish band Attack Attack!, but he has since perfected a kind of delirious, all-American riff-rock. In the “EMPTYHANDED” music video, Marlowe and Bilmuri take turns riding a lawnmower while lip-synching lyrics that, as it happens, don’t sound much different from something you might hear in a Megan Moroney song: “I hate being on your terms / It starts on and off again / Old flame with a slow burn.” At a recent concert in New York, Marlowe interrupted the country music for a mini-set of punk and emo covers, including a version of “Sugar, We’re Goin Down,” by Fall Out Boy. This was the music he grew up listening to, and he figured that the twentysomethings in the audience had probably grown up listening to it, too.

No doubt Moroney’s fans, like Marlowe’s, listen to all types of music; on platforms such as Spotify skipping from genre to genre may actually be easier than stubbornly staying put. But Moroney is canny enough to understand that country identity can be a selling point, even or especially to fans with other interests. A number of the women and girls in the crowd at Radio City were wearing white cowboy boots, many of which were suspiciously unscuffed. Instead of covering a Swift song, Moroney sang a version of “Ain’t Nothing ’Bout You,” the enduring Brooks & Dunn country hit from 2001, secure in the knowledge that many of her fans were lucky enough to be savoring it for the first time. By the end of the night, she seemed slightly stunned by the level of enthusiasm—or perhaps she, like Swift, is merely good at looking stunned. Re-creating the pose from the cover of her recent album, she placed two fingers on her neck, as if checking her pulse. The album’s title suggests a question, but in the song, which is uncharacteristically upbeat, it’s more of an affirmation: “Oh! My! God! Am! I! O! Kay!” On the album, this is the opening track, and the prelude to nearly an hour of misery. But onstage it was her closing argument—a question that answered itself. ♦