If you’re into country music but don’t actually like country music, good news: Maren Morris is releasing her new album GIRL on March 8th. In case you weren’t paying attention, Maren Morris is an artist most famously known for her collaboration with Zedd on 2018’s most persistent EDM earworm, “The Middle.” Interestingly enough, the song places itself within a series of Morris’s pop music collaborations that spanned late 2017 to mid-2018 — it was meant to be characteristically uncharacteristic of her. However, GIRL stays true to the classic pop-country sound she introduced in her 2017 debut with Hero. And the exposure’s done well for promotion — her release of single “Girl” last month achieved the highest debut on the Country Streaming chart and overall highest weekly streams for a female country artist. Now, in the week leading up GIRL’s release Morris has released her track titles and another single, “The Bones.”
“The Bones” follows all the pop country conventions you’d expect: A gentle acoustic guitar intro, lyrics about love and its tribulations, claps, a dynamic lead up to the dramatic chorus — the list goes on. Just think about the way you felt listening to Taylor Swift’s Fearless for the first time 10 years ago and you’ll know what I mean. This isn’t to say the song is dated or that it lacks ingenuity; it’s gorgeous and deserves all that hype from the country comunity. The instrumentals are sparse and bare, providing special attention to each instrument that builds up to the chorus and the succeeding metamorphosis throughout the following verses. Morris’s vocal range is also astounding, shifting to falsettos effortlessly and adding some necessary texture to the song. And these aren’t just any old lyrics — try getting “the house don’t fall when the bones are good” out of your head.
“The Bones” is nothing new, but it deserves a space after that throwback Taylor Swift bop in your next “country” playlist. As a pop country hybrid, it serves its genre well in its amiable nature and capacity to capture feelings we don’t necessarily have to feel to understand. So get into the daydreams only your nine-year-old self could conjure as you sing “Call it dumb luck, but baby you and I / Can’t even mess it up” into your hairbrush.