It is six in the evening on a rainy Thursday in Cambridge, and while the weather is predictably gloomy, the mixed-age line outside the 850-capacity Junction looks ready for a Nashville rodeo. Fans in cowboy hats, boots, denim shorts, plaid shirts, and handmade signs stretch for a mile, proof that country music fever has reached new heights ahead of tonight’s sold-out show from American country star Megan Moroney.

As the Hannah Montana anthem “Best Of Both Worlds” blasts through the speakers, the Georgia-born singer-songwriter steps on stage with a sparkling guitar, joined by an all-male band dressed in matching black vests with “emo cowgirl country” written across them. The same slogan is printed on T-shirts and caps, selling fast at the merch table. Midway through her lively, sing-along-packed set, which comes after a summer spent supporting Kenny Chesney in U.S. stadiums, she beams, “Y’all have made my dreams come true.” Even in a smaller venue, she radiates gratitude for her British fans, who range from parents with children to groups of twenty-somethings and older couples. “It’s crazy to be able to come so far from home and have y’all know the words to all these songs.”

It is a massive shift from the career she once envisioned, planning to study accounting like her mother. “Where I’m from, you do what your parents do,” she tells NME. “Most people don’t leave home or go too far.” Music was always around her. Her father had her analyzing James Taylor’s lyrics at ten years old, and The Eagles were often playing, but becoming a country artist still felt like “such a crazy, left-field idea.” When a knee injury left her in a wheelchair during high school, she used the time to learn guitar. Then, during her freshman year, a chance performance at her sorority’s charity country concert would change everything.

The sorority had splurged on booking Jon Langston but still needed an opener, so Moroney volunteered to perform three covers. In the audience was American artist Chase Rice, who later asked her to join him at a show. The only condition was that she had to play an original song. At 19, she wrote “Stay A Memory” and quickly realized that songwriting felt natural. “I was like, I don’t know how I’m going to make this happen, but I’m going to,” she remembers. From that moment, Nashville became her target. Her parents wanted her to stay in school, so it was four more years before she finally chased her dream.

The move was intimidating. “I really didn’t know if it was going to work out,” she admits. She had a backup plan to work for a label, hoping someone would notice her as a singer. After a year of daily writing in Nashville, she started to believe she could earn a living from music. Because the pandemic kept venues shut, her first full-band performance came later than expected. She eventually played Whiskey Jam, a rite of passage in the city, after only doing acoustic sets before. Soon after, she found a manager, and another eight months of writing gave her the six tracks that became her 2022 debut EP Pistol Made of Roses.

She then landed a support slot with Jamey Johnson, followed by her breakthrough with the independently released single “Tennessee Orange” in 2023. The track was recorded, mixed, and mastered in just two days. With no team or label, she even designed the cover art herself on her phone. “It’s crazy to think about what it turned into, considering how little help we had,” she says. Initially, she thought it would just be an album cut and doubted it would resonate with anyone beyond college football fans. She was proven wrong: the single hit one million streams in five days and has since passed 250 million on Spotify.

Megan Moroney. Credit: CeCe Dawson

The success of “Tennessee Orange” brought in 18 record label offers. However, Moroney recalls it feeling “weird and sketchy because some were offering me a million dollars and they’d never talked to me.” Her background in marketing, thanks to an internship with Sugarland’s Kristian Bush, who is now her longtime producer, gave her an advantage. “I wasn’t going to work with someone just because they saw a number, because what if my next project doesn’t necessarily have the numbers, are you gonna drop me and not pay attention? I want people invested in my songwriting and who I am as an artist,” she says firmly.

That approach mattered even more because her debut album was nearly complete. “I was excited to show people I wasn’t just the ‘Tennessee Orange’ girl,” she explains. She has been on the road since 2022, and even though her first major label album Lucky only arrived last May, she has not slowed down. Her second record, Am I Okay?, which she describes as “more grown-up and vulnerable,” was released in July. “I don’t even know where it came from,” she admits, noting that five of its 13 songs, most of which are about “having horrible taste in men,” were written in just two days.

“It’s all over the board of being a human in your twenties,” she explains. “There’s something for everyone; there are love songs, hopeful songs, heartbreak songs, in the middle songs, songs about my friends and grief and loss.” For Moroney, the key was to write “whenever I felt like it” while on tour and not overthink the process. “Lots of people put pressure on their second album having to be better than their first and show growth, but I saw it as my second collection of songs. And if you don’t like this, I’ll probably do something different next time anyway.”

Credit: CeCe Dawson

Moroney’s confessional style has helped her stand out during country music’s recent resurgence on both sides of the Atlantic, especially as many artists chase the trend by tweaking their sound. “I’m sure the labels are telling them to, but what’s great about country is that if it’s not authentic, the fans know right away,” she says. “Any artist in the world can put out a country song or album, but if it’s not believable, it won’t last long.” With her latest album, she has cemented her place as a real contender in the genre.

Am I Okay? is now the third-biggest country album from a female artist this year, trailing only Beyoncé and Kacey Musgraves, a considerable accomplishment so early in her career. “Anything with Kacey next to it freaks me out, because she’s the reason I wanted to write songs,” Moroney says, recalling the moment she first heard Same Trailer Different Park. “She’s such a smart writer and I fell in love with it,” she adds of Musgraves’ debut.

Given Moroney’s sharp writing and versatility, “Man on the Moon” shows off her humor, “Am I Okay?” carries a punchy energy that recalls Olivia Rodrigo, and “Girl in the Mirror” delivers a heartfelt message about self-love. It is easy to imagine her music inspiring the next wave of artists. “There are a lot of women and girls at my shows, but you can definitely find any kind of person there,” she says. “I tell the stories, but then people make them their own.”

Megan Moroney’s second album, Am I Okay?, is available now on Spotify, Apple Music, and other platforms.