Album releases become available for download Fridays at midnight East Coast Time. Since that's 9pm Thursday night West Coast Time, every Thursday night, Pepper picks her two favorite songs from the new country albums and plays them on K-Frog for New at Nine! Here are her picks for this week.
One of the most highly-anticipated albums of 2019 is the follow-up to Maren Morris's Hero album, and GIRL is finally here!
Maren will be headlining a series of all-female shows at the House of Blues, Anaheim, on Thursday, March 28th, and at the Wiltern in Los Angeles, on Friday, March 29th, and Saturday, March 30th.
Here are the songs I played from GIRL for New at Nine tonight:
1. The Bones
2. GIRL
In a statement from her label, Maren says the title track was the last one she'd written for the album that made it onto the project. "I wrote it from a place of being really self-critical and how there are so many outside factors that can affect you negatively, everything from a co-worker or a bully at school or your inner critic or your peers," she explains. "There is so much stuff in the world that you need to quiet down, and this song was a really therapeutic way ofsaying 'it is okay right now to not feel okay.'
"That's perfectly healthy to say that and there is so much healing that comes when we talk about our mental health, and I love that more people are braver at talking about that. This song just captured my journey of finding my own voice and silencing that inner critic."
Of "The Bones," Maren, who's married to country singer-songwriter Ryan Hurd, recalls that she and her co-writers, Jimmy Robbins and Laura Veltz, were all "just super-solid with our partners," and that inspired this metaphor. "Writing this song about the bones of the house even if a hurricane or storm or the wolves come the structure of the house is still standing, the foundation is still there. You could rip it down to the studs and the foundation of this relationship isn't going anywhere."
Maren is nominated for the Academy of Country Music's Female Vocalist of the Year, and she'll perform on NBC's "The Today Show" on Friday, March 8th.
