You’ve never heard Maren Morris quite like this.
On her brand new collaboration with JP Saxe, Morris sounds like she feels brand new. Maybe it’s the intuition that comes with motherhood. Or maybe it’s just seeing music through a new and hopeful 2021 lens. But either way, we are here for it, for this song about songwriting. (A topic that rarely gets the spotlight it deserves, honestly.)
Saxe, a Grammy-nominated singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist collaborated with Morris because he shares her passion for the art of song creation. “My first thought about this song is that it’s surreal I get to be sharing it with one of my favorite artists ever. Regarding what it’s about — as songwriters — we spend a lot of our lives trying to bottle up a feeling into a song, and often, the biggest feelings, the best ones, the complicated, detailed, messy, incredible ones,” Saxe said in a press release, “just aren’t going to fit. ‘Line by Line’ is our recognition of that… of how one song just isn’t enough to capture it all, but how we’re just going to keep writing, futilely and lovingly, anyway.”
And Morris echoes his emotions about the process of processing that blank sheet of paper.
“I have always loved being contemplative of the artist vs. muse relationship in songs. ‘Line by Line’ acts as a promise that I’ll never be done writing about my muse in this life because he can’t be summed up in one song,” she said. “Writing that day with JP was the most fluid, inspiring session. He’s a lyrical faucet. He threw out the line ‘immortalizing my sincerity’ and it blew my mind.
“I think all in all, we wrote the whole song in an hour and immediately recorded it.”
At the end of last year, Morris shared some news with her fans. The good news? “I am in the midst of working on my third record,” Morris wrote on Instagram. The bad news? “I have decided to cancel the RSVP tour,” she shared in the same post, having done so out of caution and the uncertainties that had originally pushed her 2020 tour into 2021.
