Megan Moroney Has Full House of Young Women Singing Every Word: Review

The Troubadour has probably never been mentioned as many times from the stage of the Greek as it was Friday night. This was because the headliner, country star Megan Moroney, had to keep pinching herself — figuratively, not literally — as she surveyed the sold-out crowd on her second night playing the storied amphitheater. The last time she headlined in L.A., she kept remarking, it had been at the 500-capacity Troubadour, and now, two years later, she was filling the 5,900-seat Greek two nights in a row. With demand to spare: Tickets on resale sites for the two shows in the weeks leading up to the shows weren’t going for much less than $300, even in the cheap seats. This was a leap for Moroney that counted as, locally, at least, a coronation.

Moroney is still eligible for a best new artist Grammy this year, even though she’s on her second album and would have been a possibility last year, too, if voters were a bit more on the ball. She seems much more assured of a nomination this time. The Grammys are not fan-voted, of course, but if they were tallied by the sound of a not-so-dull roar, Moroney might have a win in the bag. For those of us who attend shows at the Greek a great deal, probably the last time we heard a womanly roar this loud and this sustained during a concert there was when Olivia Rodrigo made her first headlining appearance there. Aside from when she slipped in a Brooks & Dunn cover, nearly every word was sung along with at top volume, as if this were a somewhat miniaturized version of the Eras Tour in which Taylor’s country era was still the only era.

But here’s the beauty part: All those words all those young ladies are shout-singing are pretty good. Better than pretty good, even. Moroney has actually been one of the leading lights of country for the last two or three years in the critical community as well as in, like, the SoCal cowgirl cosplay community. This is not a case of “the men don’t know, but the little girls understand.” In the country music world, the men have a strong understanding of just how good Moroney is, too, even if there weren’t a lot of them in the Greek crowd over the weekend. (There will be a more sizable helping of guys at the CMA Awards when she is up for six of those a month and a half from now.)

What Moroney represents now is kind of an interesting usurping of expectations. When she first appeared on the scene with her breakout hit “Tennessee Orange,” there was a near-immediate understanding that she had some solid songwriting chops, and that her sound skewed just enough toward old-school country that she would be welcomed into circles of credibility that are denied a lot of other freshmen. But she also invited suspicion with her looks, which are generally also considered to be… good. Specifically, a look that allowed for blonder-than-blonde hair, a lot of legginess and a bit of cleavage. There was some hemming and hawing: Was her image designed to appeal to the dreaded male gaze?

So how wonderfully hilarious is it that Moroney is now selling out amphitheaters — and likely headed to an arena tour next year — in front of audiences that are all about the female gaze. (Give or take the 15-20% of the crowd that might consist of boyfriends who did not find being brought along too painful.) This feels like the kind of young women’s night out that we haven’t experienced at quite this level of concentration since the glory days of the Dixie Chicks, when, for a brief, shining moment, it felt like country’s future really was female. Moroney is standing on the shoulders of other giantesses, too, but combining some of their different qualities in an interesting way — as girly as Shania Twain on the surface level but at least somewhere on the same toughness scale that is topped by Miranda Lambert, too. And there’s a self-aware humor in a lot of her music that might make you think of someone in another genre who isn’t afraid to be funny while getting dolled up, Sabrina Carpenter… although it’s also part of a strain of wit that goes back to a wide swath of mid-century country.

Outside the auditorium, there were blowups of hearts that fans could pose in front of, bearing the title of her second album: “Am I Okay?” Moroney is doing so well in just about every possible public regard at the moment, that can only count as a rhetorical question.

The actual song that goes by that title is an enthusiastic love song, or at least major crush song — and as such, it’s in the minority in her catalog. So many of her songs are about not being OK, and about being dumped or, more strikingly in Moroney’s case, having been forced to dump. It’s safe to say that a lot of her audience has fallen for her because she carries the winning persona of a beautiful loser. She does right by singing so much about realizing she snagged the wrong guy. Even when she sang one of her most hopeful songs, “Third Time’s the Charm,” about finally seemingly getting it right on love #3, she was able to get a laugh by adding, as an aside, after the line “praying that the third time’s the charm”… “it was not.” Those two words took even this rather earnest song into the realm of sly comedy, which is a place where she thrives. But also: heartbreak feels real in a place like this.

Moroney gives good lecturing. “This next song is one of my favorites I’ve ever written,” she said in introducing “Girl in the Mirror,” a signature ballad off her 2023 debut, “because I think it has a really important message and I wrote it at a time where I needed to be reminded what this song says. And I needed to be reminded to never love the boy more than I love myself. It was inspired by a toxic relationship I was in. Imagine that! And I was just shrinking myself and completely disregarding my happiness to try to be with him. I used to think that I’m a tough girl, so that means I can put up with his bullshit. Like, no one else wants to put up with his bullshit, but I can because I’m strong. And what I realize, now that I’m a little bit older, is the strength is in walking away as soon as you know you deserve better. Because it didn’t make me tough to be with an asshole, really.”

You almost don’t need a song after that, but fortunately she still had some satisfying tough self-love left over for the tune itself. As Moroney sang the sad punchline “She loved the boy more than she loved the girl in the mirror” for the first time, I watched one mom in the crowd who was presumably hearing it for the first time turn to her teenage daughter with just a concerned “Aww” expression on her face, like she was saying, “Oh, honey, that’s not good.” You had to be there, but as on the Eras Tour, there’s a real sweetness in watching mothers and daughters or sisters or besties look at one another knowingly during some of these songs, caught in a moment where they’re turning their spotlight off the star and onto something shared among themselves.

Speaking of moms: Moroney’s mother was celebrating a special at the Greek Friday night, which made some of the intros that the singer offered a little bit pointedly ironic. “Tonight’s my mom’s birthday.
Here’s a song about lying to you. Hi, mom.” That’s a good, glib line, but the singer went on to make it less of a joke. “If someone does me dirty, she don’t forgive or forget like I do,” Moroney said. “So whether it be a relationship or a friendship, if I’m not ready to cut the person out of my life yet, then I can’t tell my mom, because cause my mom will be like, ‘Do it now.’ So I wrote a song about finally being ready to let the person go and coming clean and telling my mom exactly how I was treated.” Now, that’s a birthday present.

This tour, which is nearing its end, isn’t hugely about stagecraft. One imagines it might be a bit more so if she is making the leap to a Forum or Crypto in the month to come. But one also hopes it won’t be too much in that direction, because Moroney’s relatability benefits from not having to compete with pyro. Her set design at the Greek gave her just enough room to keep the show dynamic, as she emerged from the top of a giant staircase whose steps led down to either of the twin bandstands her musicians performed on. A couple of times she reascended those steps to sing from on high, including one more subdued segment where she took a rest sitting inside a nicely mood-lit, hollowed-out heart.

But those boots were made for walkin’, and she handles rambunctiousness well, too, like in the second song, “Indifferent,” a rocker that found herself slapping the back of her boot with her hand, or borrowing some sticks from the drummer to launch her own attack on one of his cymbals. The tone of her singing voice is not diva-like but more conversational, which works highly to her advantage. She feels like someone you’ve just joined at the bar for a convo already in progress, maybe one or two beers in. Moroney reserves just enough energy during her predominant midtempo songs that when she stasrts shaking that platinum hair in a climactic moment at the end, it’s like being reminded that your calm bestie is capable of igniting a rager, too.

One other note: though Swift comparisons may not always be welcome at all times, Moroney does have her own color-coding thing going on. Playing some songs from her debut album, she brought out her green acoustic guitar, reviving that project’s color. Currently, the mode is blue, on-stage and off; looking out into her audience was like being down the way at a Dodgers game. Out at the merch stands — which had the longest nearly all-female lines this side of a Boygenius gig — it was an army of people in blue, in line to buy more blue. Who knows what they’ll do when she changes colors again with her 2026 project, (Proudly stand in line again, we’re guessing.)

If you aren’t clued in at all times to what’s happening in country music, you may be asking yourself, how and when did she get this popular… this scream-worthy? Actually, you may ask that even if you are clued into contemporary country. It’s not a story told in a sudden massive radio hit, although she’s done fine on that score. An overnight smash is a fun phenomenon to follow; so is an artist who’s building audience identification in daily dribs and drabs, not big power moves, until suddenly a choir or army of twentysomething women that wasn’t there two years ago is blasting your ears out. It’s a beautiful sound.