Maren Morris is back with the EP The Bridge, which features two new songs called “The Tree” and “Get the Hell Out of Here.” The tracks were produced by Greg Kurstin and Jack Antonoff, respectively. Listen to both below.
Morris is known for being one of the few modern day country artists willing to potentially alienate their audience in order to speak out for what they believe in; in recent years, she’s beefed with Jason Aldean and Tucker Carlson for (checks notes) not being bigoted. The Bridge taps into those feelings of isolation, but ultimately finds the singer-songwriter comfortable in her place as a Nashville outsider.
“THE BRIDGE; a connecting, transitional, or intermediate route or phase between two adjacent conditions,” Marris said in a statement. “These two songs are incredibly key to my next step because they express a very righteously angry and liberating phase of my life these last couple of years but also how my navigation is finally pointing towards the future, whatever that may be or sound like. Honoring where I’ve been and what I’ve achieved in country music, but also freely moving forward.”
Track one, “The Tree,” is the song Morris teased last week as a response to Aldean’s controversial song “Try That in a Small Town.” Its music video features a sign that reads, “Welcome to Our Perfect Small Town From Sunrise to Sundown,” and in its first seconds, the artist sings, “I’m done filling a cup with a hole in the bottom.”
‘The Tree’ is about a toxic ‘family tree’ burning itself to the ground,” Morris explained. “Halfway through, I realize it’s burning itself down without any of my help. This song evokes the pain of exhausting all your love and time for this person or ‘entity’ but realizing it’s just a draining, transactional relationship that isn’t nourishing in any healthy way. By the end of the song, I give myself permission to face the sun, plant new seeds where it’s safer to grow and realize that sometimes there IS greener grass elsewhere.”
The journey continues in “Get the Hell Out of Here,” which Morris described as “part two to the tree burning. Being quite literally burned out, this is a story of me feeling pulled in every direction, needing everyone else’s understanding and acceptance but my own and how self-destructive that ultimately became. I relinquish control of trying to change everyone’s mind or bad behavior and focus on my own power going forward. Doing the right thing can feel lonely at times, but there are more friends than foes, so I finally quit making myself one of them.”
Listen to the two-track The Bridge EP below. The project follows Morris’ 2022 LP Humble Quest, while earlier this year, she teamed with Marcus Mumford for a cover of “Look at Us Now (Honeycomb)” that appeared in Daisy Jones & the Six. Revisit Consequence’s 2022 interview with the singer-songwriter here.
