“At the beginning, I was really timid.”
That’s how Maren Morris describes her first attempts at making music when she first arrived in Nashville, after leaving her college band They Were Stars back in Texas. “I didn’t know how to voice an opinion, because I felt like I was going to sound uneducated or like I was being too aggressive. Unfortunately, as a woman, that’s the thought that’s always in your head when you want to state an opinion,” Morris said.
She was sharing this with Kiara Brown, an aspiring singer-songwriter that Morris is mentoring through the Women Who Rock Music and Mentorship program on the Today show.
“When it’s your music, it’s your song, it’s your voice,” she added, “you have complete creative umbrage to voice any opinion. It too me a few years to realize, ’This is my music. I have to ultimately have the final say, and that’s okay.’”
Morris said that she wanted to get involved in helping women who wanted to be songwriters, singers and even producers and engineers and every other job that exists in the music industry. “It’s more than just talking about it. You have to do something about it. I’ve been in so many studios where there aren’t a ton of women behind the board.
“I’ve had to kind of wake myself up to the things that I’ve overlooked,” she said. “Like, I’ve never worked with a female producer before, because you just get into rooms with men that you write songs with, and men are awesome. But it takes people to wake up and realize, ’Why are there no women in this room?’ I need to start making more of those opportunities happen.”
As part of the #SeeHerHearHer campaign, Morris was able to give Brown a check for $5,000 to jump start her music career. “It’s all this very cool tapestry that you’re gonna look back on in a year or 10 years,” Morris told Brown.
By the end of the video, Morris explained that when she pictures the future of the music business, she thinks about how her own kids will see it.
“I don’t have any kids yet, but I want my kids to look at this industry in a very different way than I’ve had to look at it,” she said. “I want them to see — in hopefully less than 10 years — everything is so much more balanced.”
https://www.today.com/video/country-superstar-maren-morris-shares-advice-for-aspiring-singer-and-songwriter-1494989379756