Maren Morris is getting the hell out of country music: 'I've said everything I can say'

Maren Morris calls her new two-track EP "The Bridge," which is just one of several metaphors she deploys in imagining a path out of the world of country music in which she became a star.

On "The Tree," the Grammy-winning singer-songwriter says she's "done filling a cup with a hole in the bottom"; "Get the Hell Out of Here" opens with the admission that she "watered the garden but forgot to fill the well."

It's not that Morris, 33, has tired of twanging guitars or neatly cornered rhymes, both of which define the tunes that came out last week, a decade after she moved to Nashville, Tennessee, from her native Texas, first to write songs for established country acts such as Tim McGraw and later to sign a major-label record deal of her own. Rather, she says she's leaving because of what she views as the country music industry's unwillingness to honestly reckon with its history of racism and misogyny and to open its gates to more women and queer people and people of color.

Thus the rootsy yet polished "The Bridge," which