Maren Morris isn’t nearly ready to make nice with Jason Aldean. Or so it seems in what looks like a tease from a new video posted by Morris on Thursday (Sept. 7). Morris posted images on Instagram from what appeared to be a visual for a new song that could take aim at Aldean’s divisive track “Try That in a Small Town.”
The caption to the post reads, “I’m done filling a cup with a hole in the bottom,” alongside a silent clip of a bucolic town with a billboard that reads: “Welcome to Our Perfect Small Town: From Sunrise to Sundown.” The post also included a shot of Morris, dressed in a gauzy black shoulder-less top, staring up into the distance at an unseen object. US magazine noted that the picture seems to be of the outfit that Morris wore at the 2016 CMAs, where she won new artist of the year at the event where Aldean was blanked on nominations, lamenting at the time to reporters, “I’ve gone out and done everything I can do to put ourselves in a position to be there, and people either vote for you or they don’t.”
The enigmatic post got an enthusiastic thumbs up from Brandi Carlile, who commented, “Oh it is ON [fire emoji].” Carlile supported Morris when the singer took issue with anti-trans comments made by Aldean’s wife, Brittany, in August 2022, when the latter wrote on Instagram, “I’d really like to thank my parents for not changing my gender when I went through my tomboy phase. I love this girly life.”
Those comments drew a sharp rebuke at the time from Morris, who called Brittany “Insurrection Barbie,” a comment that drew a “MY Barbie” comment from husband Aldean. The spat ended with Morris raising more than $100,000 for GLAAD’s Transgender Media Program and Trans Lifeline with a line of merch mocking fired Fox News personality Tucker Carlson’s attempted diss line calling Maren a “lunatic country music person.”
Morris’ apparent video tease also drew comments from Cassade Pope, who added a series of side eye emoji, while Julia Michaels wrote “WOW WOW” and Natalie Hemby posted four heart emoji. At press time a spokesperson for Morris said they had no additional comment about the post.
What appears to be the latest salvo in the Morris-Aldean skirmish seems to be keyed to Aldean’s controversial “Try That in a Small Town” single, whose video was pulled from CMT in July amid critics’ claims that it contained pro-gun and pro-lynching messages; the clip was filmed in front of the Maury County Courthouse in Columbia, TN, the site of a 1927 mob lynching of an 18-year-old Black teenager named Henry Choate and the 1946 Columbia race riot.
The song challenged those who “pull a gun on the owner of a liquor store” or “cuss out a cop” to, as the title suggests, try those actions in a small town and “see how far ya make it down the road.” The song’s video featured footage of an American flag burning, protesters having confrontations with police, looters breaking a display case and thieves robbing a convenience store.
At the time, Aldean said the claims that the song was “pro-lynching” and that it intimated he was “not too please” with the nationwide 2021 Black Lives Matter protests were “not only meritless, but dangerous“; footage of the BLM protests were later edited out of the video.
Check out Morris’ tease below.
