ACHY BREAKY

The rise of Megan Moroney, emo cowgirl.

- KELEFA SANNEH

I don't write a whole lot of love songs,” Megan Moroney said last month, onstage at Radio City Music Hall. Fortunately, that’s not exactly true. Almost all her songs are about love, although she sings mostly about coping with its absence, or its failure to be respectfully reciprocated by various dudes, including one who had a Chevrolet and a sneaky smoking habit, and who is now known, to millions of Moroney fans, as Noah. Moroney is a country singer, though not one who is unduly burdened by the genre’s venerable history, and she has honed her approach ona pair of delectable albums: “Lucky,” from 2023, and “Am I Okay?,” which arrived last summer, and which includes “Noah,” a song that builds to a plaintive confession. “Noah, you should know at night I think of you and me,” she sings. Not a depiction of romantic bliss, but a kind of love song all the same.

Moroney's songs are full of artful and sometimes acidic depictions of heartache.

When Moroney arrived at Radio City, she was a week into her first big headlining tour, and things were going even better than she might have hoped. She had sold out back-to-back shows, and the venue's velvety seats were packed with fans, many of them women with their friends, or girls with their guardians, who expressed their devotion to Moroney by drowning her out. Moroney’s songs, often written with collaborators, are full of artful and sometimes acidic depictions of heartache. She uses pithy phrases that evoke melancholy scenes: “Here you come again, who could it be?/It’s 3 A.M., no caller I.D.” But the atmosphere at the show ‘was unremittingly jubilant—and so, in a way, was Moroney herself. She asked, “Is anybody ready to have the best night of their lives?” For some of the younger fans who hollered their agreement, this was probably no exaggeration.