Maren Morris wants to make one thing clear before she heads out on the road for her first extended run of shows in almost three years.

“At my core, I’m a tour rat,” she says with a laugh, while sitting for a Zoom interview in late May—a few days before she is set to embark on her first amphitheater tour as a headliner. “I really haven’t seen my crowd since October 2019. I missed the familial vibe of being on the road.”

As she looks ahead to her expansive shed outing, the Nashville-based singer is also in the midst of a promotional cycle for her third major-label album, Humble Quest, which dropped in late March on Columbia Nashville. It’s her first LP in three years and first since she and her husband, fellow country musician Ryan Hurd, welcomed their son Hayes in 2020. Morris has been open about her struggle with post-partum depression and, like most new parents, stuck pretty close to home as the global pandemic continued to surge. In fact, besides some crowdless streams—including at Brooklyn Bowl Nashville in 2020—the singer didn’t rush back on the road, even as much of the country world began to open up. When she did return to the stage for some sporadic dates in late 2021 and early 2022, she largely stuck to special events, festivals and promo spots—all of which makes her first proper headlining tour in almost three years even sweeter.

“I love getting into a groove on the road with my band and my crew—hanging out in catering and finding activities to do in each city during the day,” she says. “That whole vibe, even offstage, is something that I’ve missed dearly. When it kicks off, I’m probably going to cry because I know that it can go away at any second. I’m just so anxious; I’m mostly just ready to be shot out of the cannon.”

Morris’ summer trek arrives at an important juncture for the 32-year-old country crossover star. In 2018, her profile skyrocketed when she sang on Zedd and Grey’s dance-pop smash “The Middle.” She followed up that moment with her sophomore major label album, the Grammy-nominated 2019 set Girl and its accompanying Girl: The World Tour support run. Around the same time, she teamed up with Brandi Carlile, Natalie Hemby and Amanda Shires on the all-star, Dave Cobb-produced The Highwomen LP, which also cracked the Top 10 on the Billboard 200. Yet, before Morris was truly able to capitalize on her success as a bigticket headliner, the pandemic grounded her at home in Nashville. And, almost three years later, she is finally ready to check a number of truly iconic spaces off her bucket list.

“I feel so lucky to even be in those venues as the headliner—every tour I do, I’m always worried if people are going to show up,” she says sheepishly. “Even with this one—even though we haven’t toured in a couple of years—it makes me nervous to be moving into bigger venues because it’s like, ‘What the hell?’ There were certain places we didn’t do because I don’t think I’m ready. After two years of not doing anything, I don’t think I’m ready to do Madison Square Garden. So I ended up changing certain venues because I just didn’t feel ready in all the ways.

“And I wanted to keep most of these venues outdoors,” she adds. “So we have some makeshift tour routing, where we’re doing smaller amphitheaters and a lot of boutique amphitheaters, and we’re also doing Gilford and Red Rocks and Hollywood Bowl. There’s some very iconic venues that I’ll be headlining but, at the same time, it’s my first tour to really not work with a single promoter. I’m proud of my team for accomplishing that. And it’s going to be beautiful.”

She pauses and thinks back to her 2016 opening run for Keith Urban, which took her to several marquee venues around the country. “We did the whole summer in sheds and amphitheaters and then we did the fall in arenas,” she says, a sense of awe in her voice. “I have memories that I made in certain cities, where I just thought like, ‘Oh, my goodness, I can’t wait to play this place myself one day as the headliner.’ After the sun goes down, too, is a big one. I’ve always been the 7 p.m. slot, and the sun is just beating on you.”

This summer, Morris—who says that she found out she was pregnant the day she wrote the Humble Quest track “Hummingbird”—is also learning how to balance her family responsibilities with her touring commitments. Like many stars in the social media age, she’s publicly documented the ups and down of parenthood, from her C-section recovery to the isolation of young motherhood in the COVID era to the beauty of seeing the world through a young child’s eyes.

“He’s two, and he’s coming out on the road this summer so I’ve been looking for things to do in each city because—before soundcheck, before the show—your time is your own,” she says of Hayes. “You’ve got all day and, with a toddler, you wake up at the crack of dawn so I’m looking up a lot of city zoos and children’s museums and things that we can go do as a family during the day before the ‘mom onstage’ part happens. It’s a new way of touring, for sure, for me. I am eager to see how that works out because the last few years— being stuck inside, having a kid—our bedtime has been 9 p.m. and I’m going to be going onstage a lot of time on this tour at 9 p.m. So I’ll be like, ‘I’ll have to adapt to both sides of my personality.’”

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Morris crafted the reflective, candid Humble Quest throughout the pandemic, partnering with producer and co-writer Greg Kurstin—known for his work with Adele, Paul McCartney and Foo Fighters—as well as Julia Michaels, Jimmy Robbins, Laura Veltz, Jon Green, Hemby and her husband. Despite coming off a six times platinum-certified hit, she strove to make the album her most open and honest. And she candidly digs into her imperfections.

“It was the first time since my first record that I was able to make something without touring,” she says. “I find it very hard to write on the road. I wrote most of my album, Girl, on the back of my tour bus. And there is just no way to really separate the creative part of your brain from the work mode that you have to be in for the rest of the evening. As much as I do love that album and the songs on it, it’s not a very functional way for me to write. So one silver lining of the pandemic was that I wasn’t touring, and I could figure out what I wanted to write about.”

She also credits a “quar-fecta” of powerful ‘90s female singers—Fiona Apple, Alanis Morissette, Sheryl Crow and Jewel—with influencing her record’s direction. On the road, Morris has been nodding to those seminal acts, which her mother would often play at home, by covering Apple’s “Criminal” before her original track “Nervous.”

“Humble Quest, in a way, takes a bit from all of them,” Morris says. “I’ve got this song on my record called ‘Nervous,’ which feels very ‘90s rock and angsty, but also sexy. It just feels like it flows into ‘Criminal’ really well.”

The singer says that the unexpected downtime afforded her the ability to “reorient myself and my heart into what I was feeling and what I wanted to say and put on paper.” And she hopes to adhere to a similar approach next time she enters the studio. “It was different not being able to really road-test any of these songs. But it’s cool because it just feels like a big reveal.”

She also believes that her time working with The Highwomen left an indelible mark on her latest set. “I carry something with me from each collaborative experience I’ve had over the years,” she says. “I learned so much about how to headline and how to be a boss touring with Keith Urban. He’s just got such a level of respect and kindness for his entire band and crew, and it comes from the top down. Then, working with Zedd on ‘The Middle’ and working with Alicia Keys at my first Grammys—I take things from each experience and utilize them in a way that’s positive and functional for me. And, with The Highwomen recording process, we were playing live in the historic RCA Studio A.”

Though she had previously worked with Cobb on a non-album project, it was her first time tracking an entire LP that way, singing in the same room as her fellow Highwomen.

“That was such a throwback concept— you’re not going and doing a separate vocal,” she says. “That was so new for me, and I loved it. I felt really connected to the music. I didn’t feel beholden to a certain tempo. You get to feel it out. And, in a certain way, I definitely carried that into The Humble Quest recording process. There’s not a ton of programming or tracks. It’s just live instruments—I realized that I didn’t need all the bells and whistles. The Highwomen’s process was about knowing that it’s more emotional to hear a great vocal; it’s about how powerful the human voice is. Not that I ever really relied on Autotune, but I feel like there are certain things in the studio that became a crutch, and now I know that I don’t need that to get my point across.”

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A lifelong entertainer, Morris was born and raised in Arlington, Texas, and first started singing in her school choir and at parties in the hair salon her parents owned. By her preteens, Morris had started to make a name for herself as a local performer and she even began touring around Texas. The singer tried several avenues—her American Idol audition didn’t work out the way she’d hoped—and eventually, at the urging of fellow Texan singer Kacey Musgraves, relocated to Nashville.

After landing in Music City, her songs were picked up by mega-stars Tim McGraw and Kelly Clarkson, but Morris decided to forge ahead as a solo artist and eventually signed with Columbia Nashville. Her 2016 album, Hero established her as an emerging country musician, but it was “The Middle” that truly launched her into the pop stratosphere. Girl peaked at No. 4 on the Billboard charts and, around the same time, she began working with Carlile, Shires and, eventually, Hemby as The Highwomen. The supergroup made their official debut at Loretta Lynn’s 87th birthday concert on April 1, 2019.

“We met a long time ago at a little Texas festival called Raz on the Braz,” Shires says of her first encounter with Morris. “Brandi Carlile called Maren and asked her to come into the studio. It was a no-brainer from the get go. She’s got the voice, the class and that wild Texas spirit that don’t take no bullshit.”

If “The Middle” scored Morris a new pop following, then her association with The Highwomen cemented her status in the critically acclaimed Americana world. And she found her audience ballooning to include folk fans and jam-approved festival goers alike. Even though they only released one album and made a handful of live appearances, it also gave her a whiff of life in a band.

“The Highwomen gave me a lot of recording perspective and wisdom,” she says. “It was my first time being part of a group.”

Building on the connections she made with The Highwomen, Morris will also roll into Newport Folk Festival, an event she played with her supergroup in 2019, later this summer.

“We played Newport Folk with The Highwomen, and that was my first time ever being there,” she says. “It had this iconic feeling—beautiful and intimate. So I’m very excited to be coming back to Newport as a solo artist. I’ve been to a lot of great festivals. I had fun at Coachella onstage with Zedd a couple of years ago. I really enjoyed going back to ACL—I grew up going to that one, so playing it was really fun. We just did Stagecoach and Hangout Fest, which were fun. I got to meet Post Malone playing beer pong, and he gave me a bottle of his rosé. As an artist, the most fun thing about a festival is getting to connect with other artists—it feels like summer camp. You get to stand side stage and watch their show and hang out backstage, and you don’t normally get to do that when you’re just on a tour. That’s why I love going to festivals—being a performer and a fan.”

Similarly, Shires remembers The Highwomen’s Newport set as a defining moment. “Dolly [Parton] glued a rhinestone to my face,” she says. “But, the highlight was taking the stage and looking toward the crowd and seeing so many like-minded people. The community and fellowship made for a very moving musical meditation and brought us lots of joy and hope.”

Morris also makes a point to rattle off her Bonnaroo bona fides, having attended the festival several times—even before she was officially on the bill. “We got there just in time to see Tove Lo—she was incredible, and I was such a fan of her album that had come out previously,” she gushes of a 2015 trip to The Farm. “The headliners that year were Kendrick, My Morning Jacket and Mumford & Sons.”

The following year, she scored a chance to perform on the festival’s intimate Who Stage the week Hero was released. And despite now being a clear pop star whose life and music are covered in magazines like People and US Weekly, Morris still often thinks back on her early days sweating it out in Manchester, Tenn. “It was crazy to be there, after having been as a fan,” she says of her debut appearance.

“It was hot as shit on the Who Stage, and we had no shade—the sun was right on us. It was 20 minutes of fury. That was such a fun year. Bonnaroo is so diverse, in terms of all the music that plays there. It just felt like I had really arrived—and not just as a Nashville musician.”