Concert Reviews

It sent the message that Morris was prepared to share exactly where she is now and wasn’t much interested in looking back.

If Maren Morris hadn’t built her name on carving a fiercely independent path for herself, it’d be easy to accuse her of simply aping Kacey Musgraves.

Both singers started out as darlings of the country music establishment before getting squeezed out of the good graces of Nashville as their music took more unorthodox turns and they became more outspoken.

And just as Musgraves’s 2022 swing through Boston saw her touring behind a record that chronicled her response to the dissolution of her marriage, so too did Morris bring her own divorce album to the Leader Bank Pavilion on Friday.

That was very nearly all Morris brought, in fact. In the 95 minutes she was onstage, she played the entirety of May’s Dreamsicle (plus a pair of songs from the month-old deluxe edition) and precious little else.

For an artist with four albums under her belt since the popular breakthrough of her 2016 country/gospel smash “My Church,” it sent the message that Morris was prepared to share exactly where she is now and wasn’t much interested in looking back, even if doing so would have resulted in a more generous survey of her full career that would have comfortably taken the concert past the two-hour mark.

Morris arrived on a lavender platform in a glittery, feathery dress that flared like her hair in the fans blowing at her feet, dancing at the outset to the joyfully throbbing keyboards of “Cry In The Car.”

It was a direct mirror of the song’s subject matter, the ebullience of the performance covering up the emotional breakdown that only happens when no one else can see, a theme that came up again in “Cut!” and “Carry Me Through.”

But Morris didn’t choose to wallow too much in the sadness of her marriage’s end.

She sought out and found strength in the support of friends, both within the songs themselves (“People Still Show Up,” a confident swing with enough of a groan to feel it in the gut) and in the audience, who couldn’t let Morris sing the good-riddance anthems “Lemonade” or “Too Good” without joining in themselves.

There was also the matter of Morris being single once more.

(After saying that she’s dating for the first time in 15 years to minimal response, she told the crowd, “I love that no one’s clapping because it’s not been good.”)

In a few cases, she straightforwardly admitted to avoiding what she once sang about in “The Feels.”

“Bed No Breakfast” was all about reclaiming her own space and privacy in the morning after the night before, while “I Hope I Never Fall In Love” hinged on the very next word: “…again.”

Even so, there was room for “Push Me Over,” where she detailed how very much she wanted to tumble.

Unfortunately, the power of the material and Morris’s performance were muted by a frustrating sound mix. Even on a song as soft as “Grand Bouquet” — with its fingerpicked acoustic guitars, gentle vocal harmonies and a light kick-drum thumping just loud enough to be felt — she had trouble popping out, and the chorus of “Holy Smoke” should have been the glorious release of a heart starting to beat out of its chest, but landed flat instead.

Meanwhile, on the other end of the emotional spectrum, the attitude she was throwing on “Be A Bitch” stubbornly refused to come out as crisply as it should have. Far too many songs felt like watching a concert on the other side of a closed window.

But it was easy to see how good Morris was, if only she could have gotten the sonic clarity she deserved. A number of songs leaned heavily on glossy, big-budget ’80s-pop production reminiscent of Mike + the Mechanics, Steve Winwood and Belinda Carlisle, from “Push Me Over” and “80s Mercedes” to the self-affirmation uplift of “Running.”

And much like “I Hope I Never Fall In Love,” with its ’70s adult-contemporary chorus that it was easy to imagine rollerskating to, the bright plastic sheen and the ebullience with which Morris approached them were largely what made those songs work.

That’s what carried Morris through. Her voice may not have had the same rough edges that Tove Lo brought, but she captured the hunger in “Talking Body” nonetheless, and her strutting frustration on “The Middle” came off as pure joy.

And she was commanding on “Girl,” where the song’s deliberate steps gave her space to throw herself into an impassioned vocal. As Morris herself would sing as she closed the night out, when the bones are good, the rest don’t matter.

Atop guitar atmospherics and click-snap drum clomps that were cleaner than the mix afforded the headliner, opener Jade LeMac had a pleading, confident sway, delivering a tight-lipped but open-throated (and -hearted) vocal that alternated between a swooping keen and a murmur.

Setlist for Maren Morris at Leader Bank Pavilion — September 5, 2025

• Cry In The Car
• 80s Mercedes
• People Still Show Up
• Girl
• Cut!
• I Hope I Never Fall In Love
• Bed No Breakfast
• Too Good
• Be A Bitch
• Rich
• Grand Bouquet
• Dreamsicle
• Holy Smoke
• Running
• The Middle
• Lemonade
• Push Me Over
• Talking Body (Tove Lo cover)
• This Is How A Woman Leaves
• My Church
• Carry Me Through
• Because, Of Course
• The Bones

Marc Hirsh can be reached at [email protected] or on Bluesky @spacecitymarc.bsky.social.

Marc Hirsh

Music Critic

Marc Hirsh is a music critic who covers a wide variety of genres, including pop, rock, hip-hop, country and jazz.

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