There is almost nothing in common between two Nashville acts who put out albums on July 12 2024.
Megan Moroney is a fair-haired, fair-voiced singer who is one of very few women on the moribund medium of country radio, airplay on which still determines how an act is positioned.
Michael Hardy is the latest backroom songwriter to be granted a career of his own, although he has mixed his solo albums with a series of mixtapes, the Hixtapes, where he sometimes doesn’t even appear on certain songs.
Am I Okay? is Megan’s second album, and Quit!! is Hardy’s third. Perhaps the punctuation marks in their titles are the only things they share, although I would argue that both are examples of how new acts are positioned in a crowded market. I’ll tackle Megan’s album first, as is only polite.
Megan Moroney – Am I Okay?
Megan’s debut album Lucky came out last May and I found it really great, thanks to a voice that I called ‘a less boisterous Priscilla Block or more sarcastic Kelsea Ballerini, sometimes with the rasp of Sheryl Crow’. Boosted by the success of Tennessee Orange and I’m Not Pretty at radio, Megan came over for The Long Road in 2023 and will tour the UK this September including a date at the Kentish Town Forum.
Her wisp of a voice never blasts a note, instead crooning it to allow her audience to gently sing along with her; this is music to accompany the listener, not dazzle them with vocal runs. Kristian Bush produces once again and almost every song is about getting, having or losing a boy. One exception is Heaven By Noon, where the narrator is ‘angry at the sky’ for taking away a loved one; the song will resonate with a wider audience, although I wish the album had more songs dealing with these lyrical themes.
Perhaps this isn’t what her existing fanbase wants, which is an indictment of corporate thinking. The five pre-released tunes all stuck to the brief. No Caller ID, where Megan gets drunk-dialled by an ex at 3am before realising ‘I’m tired of hurtin’ me so I let it ring’, was a torch song brought to us by Megan, Jessie Jo Dillon and the two writers who wrote I Drive Your Truck for Lee Brice, Jessi Alexander and Connie Harrington.
The same team wrote Noah, a reminiscin’ song with some fluttering mandolin in the mix, on which Megan wonders if her teenage crush thinks about her too. ‘We were countin’ on forever but forever never came’ is a good line, and the reference to Record Year by Eric Church precisely dates the relationship as happening in 2016.
Megan teased us with much of the album’s first side: the spiky, hooky kiss-offs Man on the Moon (‘someone take this cowboy away!’), on which Ashley Gorley was involved, and Indifferent, which borrows about 99% of its attitude from Olivia Rodrigo’s Good 4 U; and 28th of June, a piano ballad about a past relationship where Megan was ‘too naïve’.
She wrote all 14 songs, including two by herself: closing acoustic number Hell of a Show, where the narrator tells herself to ‘keep it together’ onstage then ‘cry herself to sleep’ later, offering one of the best sighs on record this year; and Third Time’s the Charm, where she hopes love works out for her this time, ‘a brand new kind of wind back in my sails…I’m already scared to let you go’. Where have we heard such emotional pop-country before?
Ah yes, from Ms Swift, whose old songwriting buddy Liz Rose was involved on Miss Universe, which kicks off the album’s second side. The guitars clang while our narrator drinks to forget another old flame who ‘found a beauty queen…at least it wasn’t a county pageant!’ There’s also a fun punchline just before the final chorus and the whole song is full of the same surfeit of character in the vocal that marked the songs on Lucky.
The similarly rockin’ title track opens the album: written with Kacey’s co-writer Luke Laird, the guitars echo the rush of a new relationship with the singalong hook ‘Oh my God, am I okay?’ I don’t know why they had to bleep out ‘bed’ in the phrase ‘good in bed’, given that Megan’s audience would be familiar with what goes on between consenting adults. On Indifferent, there is a more common sense edit as Megan sings ‘I see your truck and I don’t give a – ‘.
Such edits show that Megan is being targeted at young teenagers as an elder sister wise to the ways of love and romance. Witness Mama I Lied, which begins with her admitting that yes, the drink and the weed were indeed hers when she was 16 – why was this not edited out, given that such premature dabbling is illegal? – and so is the awful boy she is about to dump. A real string section and a lightly cracking voice add pathos and vulnerability, making the song is perfect for TikTok lip-synchs.
Ditto The Girls, an anthem to sisterhood that rewrites This One’s for the Girls by Martina McBride and Crazy Angels by Carrie Underwood. The presence of pop writer J Kash in the credits of I Know You, a meditation about cheating and heartbreak, might make Megan appeal beyond country radio audiences. She recently opened for Brooks & Dunn, so her label isn’t quite pushing her to pop audiences just yet.
Shane McAnally was in the room for Hope You’re Happy, which rewrites Space Cowboy by Kacey Musgraves (and yep, that is Vince Gill adding harmonies). McAnally, of course, was one of Kacey’s group of writers, and Megan is definitely being positioned as another sensitive singer/songwriter in the Kacey mould. It helps that their voices and ranges are similar, and that Megan is playing the country radio game from which Kacey sensibly walked away.
Hardy – Quit!!
As for Hardy, who topped the country radio charts with the magnificent Truck Bed, he has made his money writing songs for Florida Georgia Line and Morgan Wallen. With the best will in the world, he lacks Wallen’s smouldering sex appeal and is forever dressed in oversized casual shirts.
His second album The Mockingbird and The Crow included Truck Bed and was split down the middle between Wallen-like country and shouty-shouty rock, which pointed to his future direction. Signed to Big Loud Rock and with this album’s singles having topped the US Hard Rock chart, Hardy is thus being targeted at audiences who mosh in clubs and at festivals, and who are familiar with screaming choruses. Oddly, he will be touring this year with the decidedly non-screaming Kip Moore, with two dates at Red Rocks Amphitheatre in Colorado.
Hardy calls himself ‘an orphan of this country music town…trying to find my home’ in a mission statement that seems very personal. The title track makes this struggle more explicit: it’s basically Lose Yourself by Eminem rewritten to stick Hardy’s life in a song (‘Wallen put me on the track’) and to set himself up for the album as ‘a black sheep’, albeit a chart-topping one.
If country acts like Sam Hunt can bring in hiphop drum patterns, why can’t acts like Hardy employ chunky bass riffs and, as in the final seconds of Rockstar, throated growls? It increases the chances that Hardy will be heard by a wider audience of rock fans when the genre has been usurped in sales and importance by hiphop.
Chad Smith, drummer of Red Hot Chili Peppers, is on Good Girl Phase, a song about a femme fatale in disguise which was written with Hardy’s fellow Nashville A-list writers David Garcia and Hunter Phelps. That pair also helped Hardy to create the character of Jim Bob, a depressed redneck misfit who doesn’t go to church, shoots his gun (‘POW POW POW!’) and listens to Hank Jr. Perhaps Hardy has performed to some real-life Jim Bobs, and if anyone didn’t know what real Southern rednecks are like, this facsimile of Upchurch does and what Jelly Roll used to do will help.
A lot of the album’s lyrics come with invisible exclamation marks. Rocker Knox sings the first verse of scream-along Happy Hour, which argues against getting drunk and how ‘everybody in here is sad!’; Soul4Sale features Fred Durst, whose Redcap character dominated the years between 1998 and 2002 when he and his band Limp Bizkit were a nasty counterpoint to teen-pop. ‘I got that country bizkit running!’ is nostalgic and enlivens a dull song whose slowly building arrangement places the twin vocalists upfront. It’s akin to stunt casting.
I also love the braggadocio of I Don’t Miss (‘my first name’s Michael!’), which verges on satire. Rockstar is definitely satire: having observed that lots of acts have songs with that title, including Nickelback whose music, like this album, was produced by Joey Moi, now Hardy has one too. ‘I’ve still got a box to check!’ is his excuse, and early adopters will recognise the quote from Hardy’s similarly catchy old song Rednecker.
Rockstar and the singalong at the end of philosophical and mostly acoustic ballad Six Feet Under (Caleigh’s Song) will go down well live. They will both slot into his show around the Creed songs Hardy has added to his setlist; if you like My Sacrifice, you will love Quit!! It makes me think of the times rockers picked up their acoustic guitars, as when Extreme sung More Than Words, Goo Goo Dolls did Iris or Metallica hired an orchestra for Nothing Else Matters.
Tyler Hubbard off of FGL was in the room to write Psycho, which uses the same chords as ABC by Gayle and on whose chorus Hardy sings he will go berserk if his girl leaves him. His great friends Ashley Gorley, Ernest and Hillary Lindsey help out on the meet-cute power ballad WHYBMWL, the aforementioned Soul4Sale and the stadium rock chugger Time To Be Dead respectively.
The theme of that last song is picked up on Live Forever, which was written with two other Big Loud staffers and has a message that ‘if the good die young’ then bad boys will be eternal. Nashville’s hitmakers for hire have, for this assignment, been tasked with writing bellow-along-able songs with guitar breaks which have depth and melody often absent from, say, unit-shifters by Imagine Dragons or Kings of Leon.
Or, on the country side, Jason Aldean. Truck Bed was so magical because it was out-Aldeaned Aldean and was better than anything he had ever put out. He is still chugging away after all these years to diminishing returns but served his purpose with his muscular country. If Quit!! pulls in rock fans to country as Aldean did, and to a present time where Luke and Jelly and Wallen and Lainey are market leaders, so much the better.
A Country Way of Life 