Country’s Latest Feminist Corrective – The New York Times

“You couldn’t care more. I couldn’t care less.” You’re trying to take another pass. Get in. Let’s talk about it. “Heartbreaker, what doesn’t kill you calls you six months later.” Every decade in country music, it seems like there’s one or at least one female singer who’s dedicated to the project of dismantling masculinity. I’m thinking Loretta, Dolly, Reba, the Dixie Chicks, Shania, Miranda. And now, in the 2020s, it’s Megan Moroney. Megan’s got two albums so far, and they are full of incredibly clever, wise, arched eyebrow songwriting about the modern feminist condition, which through her lens, sounds really rough. “All of a sudden now you’re willing and able. Little therapy. Now you’re so stable.” “Six Months Later” is the new Megan Moroney song. It’s about a guy who shows up and delivers nothing and then leaves and decides, wait a minute, I really have something to offer. “Your next girlfriend will be so lucky.” You really feel the handiwork at play in the production. It kind of has the sense of her singing to you from across a table at dinner. It’s not bombastic, it’s offhanded. It’s really delivered in a way that’s kind of like, hey, girl, you’ve been through this too, right. “I was barely alive, at 6 feet deep, I was 5.” Singers like Megan Moroney often act as a corrective in country music, which is an incredibly male-dominated genre. Bros, post-bros, gentlemen, every shade of guy that you can think of is at the top of the charts. Megan Moroney is not quite successful at that level, but she’s been persistent and consistently popular. And that tells me that there’s an audience hankering for someone to tell them that everybody else that they’re hearing on the radio, those guys are dogs.