Maren Morris – My Church

Maren Morris had given up on being a performer. She had moved to Nashville to write songs for other people. Then she wrote one she could not stand to hear anyone else sing.

Maren Morris had stopped trying to be a star. The Arlington, Texas singer had been a performer since childhood — playing honky-tonks and chili cook-offs and talent shows across Texas from the age of twelve, releasing independent records in 2005, 2007, and 2011 — and by the time she moved to Nashville in her early twenties, she had burned out on the effort of it. She had not had the appetite to stand on a stage for years. So she rebuilt herself as a songwriter-for-hire instead, learning the Music Row craft of co-writing in rooms with other people, placing songs with Tim McGraw and Kelly Clarkson, grinding out a living as a writer rather than an artist. “Those first few years were really just me in the trenches,” she has said, “writing with anybody that would be in the room with me.” She had made her peace with being the person who wrote the song rather than the person who sang it. Then, on a writing trip to California in early 2015, she wrote “My Church” — and could not bear the thought of handing it to anyone else.

The song came out of a drive. Morris was in California, alone in a car, hungover after a night out and frustrated by a writing trip that had not been producing ideas, when she turned up the radio and felt something shift. The relief she felt — the specific sensation of finding a kind of salvation in a moving car with the music loud — gave her the title before it gave her anything else. “I was driving around, and all of a sudden, it just hit me,” she said. “The title, ‘My Church,’ popped in my mind.” She had no melody and no lyrics to support it, only the phrase and a conviction about what it could mean. “Country music is my religion in a way,” she has said. “When you think about Johnny Cash’s ‘Sunday Morning Coming Down’ and Hank Williams — where do I even begin with his catalog? — it’s church to me.”

Built in under an hour in a Los Angeles studio

She brought the idea the next day to the Glassell Park studio of the songwriter and producer busbee — Michael James Ryan Busbee, who worked under the lowercase single name and who had already built hits for Rascal Flatts, Hunter Hayes, and Pink. busbee was, in Morris’s telling, an instant believer. He suggested a pair of lines — “Can I get a hallelujah / Can I get an amen” — that the two of them initially thought they would tuck into an a cappella bridge. As busbee built the track underneath the verse, Morris recognized that the lines were too strong to use only once. They became the chorus. The whole song, by the account on the Grand Ole Opry’s own artist page, was constructed in under an hour. busbee co-produced the recording with Morris and gave it the clipped drums and the compressed, AM-radio vocal treatment that made a song about radio sound like it was coming through one. The gospel harmonies were cut later at Sound Emporium in Nashville by the McCrary Sisters — a Nashville gospel quartet whose members had sung on actual Johnny Cash recordings. “It’s sort of full circle for me,” Morris said, “because they’ve sung on Johnny Cash songs, and to have them singing backup for a song that mentions him — yeah.”

“My Church” went out first as a digital single in 2015 and behaved like nothing a first-time major-label artist’s debut single is supposed to. It generated close to three million streams in little over a month before it had any radio support at all, drawing major-label interest that resulted in Morris signing to Columbia Nashville, which re-released her self-titled five-song EP in November 2015 and then sent “My Church” to country radio as an official single on January 19, 2016. It became the lead single from her major-label debut album Hero, released June 3, 2016. The single reached No. 5 on Billboard’s Hot Country Songs chart, No. 3 on Country Airplay — where it spent twenty-two weeks — and No. 50 on the all-genre Hot 100. It was certified double platinum by the RIAA. Hero debuted at No. 5 on the Billboard 200 and went to No. 1 on the Top Country Albums chart, the first debut album to top that chart since Sam Hunt’s Montevallo two years earlier.

The night the gospel staging caught up with the song

The recognition came fast. At the 59th Annual Grammy Awards in February 2017, “My Church” won Best Country Solo Performance and was nominated for Best Country Song. It had already earned Morris a place among the most-nominated artists at the 2016 Country Music Association Awards, where the song was up for both Single and Song of the Year and Morris herself won New Artist of the Year — an award she accepted, as she told the Bridgestone Arena crowd, a year after watching the same ceremony from a bar across the street. Billboard placed “My Church” at No. 15 on its list of the 100 Best Pop Songs of 2016; the Village Voice’s national critics’ poll ranked it No. 29 among all records of the year, regardless of genre. The song that had pulled Morris back from a songwriter’s career had made her, within twelve months, a country star.

Morris has continued the run since. Girl in 2019 produced the No. 1 country singles “Girl” and “The Bones.” Her 2018 collaboration with Zedd and Grey, “The Middle,” became a worldwide pop hit certified six times platinum. She co-founded the country supergroup The Highwomen with Brandi Carlile, Amanda Shires, and Natalie Hemby. busbee, who had been central to the sound of Morris’s first two albums, died of glioblastoma on September 29, 2019, at the age of 43; Morris has spoken of him since as the collaborator who helped her find the version of herself that wanted to be on the microphone. By the middle of the 2020s, Morris had stepped back from the country genre’s institutional culture and broadened her music toward pop, releasing the album Dreamsicle in 2025. Whatever direction her catalog has taken, “My Church” has remained the origin point — the song a burned-out Nashville songwriter wrote in a car and then could not give away.

The performance below is the official video of Morris singing “My Church” at the 50th Country Music Association Awards on November 2, 2016, at Bridgestone Arena in Nashville. Introduced by Carrie Underwood, Morris opened the performance alone under a single spotlight, singing the first “can I get a hallelujah” a cappella before the staging revealed the Preservation Hall Jazz Band and the McCrary Sisters behind her. By the final chorus she had handed her acoustic guitar to a stagehand and walked the length of the stage’s catwalk. Minutes after she left the stage, she returned to it to accept the New Artist of the Year award: