MUSIC PREMIERES
Maren Morris can speak from experience: No other concert crowd holds a candle to Taylor Swift‘s.
While on The Jennifer Hudson Show Wednesday (May 7), the Texas-born singer-songwriter opened up about performing her Fearless (Taylor’s Version) collaboration, “You All Over Me,” with Swift at one of the pop superstar’s 2023 Eras Tour shows in Chicago. “I’ve never seen a crowd like that, and there’s not a crowd like hers,” Morris raved.
“They’re so supportive, they’re listening to all the lyrics, they want to hear every nuance and breath between words,” she continued. “They’re truly locked in. It was a real treat to experience on that plane.”
The duo sang together at the “Fortnight” musician’s second of three Soldier Field shows in June 2023, which came two years after they first teamed up for the re-release of Swift’s blockbuster 2008 sophomore album. The performance marked the first time they’d ever played “You All Over Me” — a From the Vault bonus track on the revamped Fearless — live.
But Morris and Swift had been friends long before that, performing the former’s smash “The Middle” together in Arlington, Texas, on the latter’s Reputation Tour in 2018. In November 2023, the “Circles Around This Town” singer told Jimmy Fallon that her onetime collaborator has “been so supportive of me and my career over the years,” adding, “We’re the same age, but looking up to her since I was a teenager, and watching her navigate her country music to pop career so gracefully, and the way she treats her fans is so kind and generous … she’s setting a high bar.”
Morris echoed those sentiments on Hudson’s talk show, telling the host, “I fell in love with [Swift’s] songwriting back in high school, and I just turned 35, so I feel like even before I met Taylor, I had this friendship in my mind with her.”
The interview comes two days ahead of Morris’ fourth studio album, Dreamsicle, which features the five tracks she previously dropped in August on EP Intermission. The new project is also preceded by two singles, “Carry Me Through” and “Bed No Breakfast,” released in March and April, respectively.
Watch Morris gush about Swift on The Jennifer Hudson Show below.
After first rising to prominence with the expansive, 1980s-inspired dream-pop of ‘Preacher’s Daughter’ and its standout tracks, Ethel Cain has spent much of her artistic journey trying to step away from that sound. She’s leaned into a moodier mix of drone, ambient rock, and raw analogue textures. “I’m not a fucking pop artist,” the Tallahassee singer once told The FADER, adding, “I reject that wholeheartedly.” Her experimental projects ‘Perverts’ and ‘Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You’ make that stance very clear, and her latest tour often feels like a firm break from the softer sounds that brought her into the spotlight.
For the first of her five headline nights at Hammersmith Apollo, Hayden Anhedönia builds a scene that feels like a slightly playful, gently eerie B-movie graveyard. She spends most of the performance tucked inside a moss-covered altar, surrounded by dramatic lighting and a crucifix mic stand. The show is nearly silent when it comes to onstage chatter. The rare moments she does address the audience are understated and easy to miss. When a fan shouts their love for her, she responds with a simple “Thank you!” from the darkness.
Instead of walking the stage to build energy, the lighting design carries that weight, mirroring the intensity of her songs. During the gritty, heavy ‘Dust Bowl’, she sings inside a slowly circling beam of light that sweeps across the Apollo with piercing brightness, while strobing green and white lights heighten the tension during long instrumental passages.
Ethel Cain. Credit: Connie Burke
As the warm, rough-edged guitars of ‘Knock At The Door’ fill the room, the production shows it can match the strange, atmospheric side of Cain’s catalogue, even if those moments are rare tonight. The set doesn’t lean heavily on ‘Perverts’, but brief pieces of ‘Houseofpsychoticwomn’ and the title track make their way in. The industrial ballad ‘Vacillator’ appears in full, bathed in stark white light as she softly sings, “If you love me, keep it to yourself,” on a track heavy with buried emotion.
For the most part, the night is devoted to ‘Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You’. The album slows the cinematic Southern Gothic of her debut ‘Preacher’s Daughter’ and explores the dizzying pull of a teenage love triangle. The shimmering synths of ‘Fuck Me Eyes’ and the lush strings of ‘Nettles’ bring an early glow, before the performance drifts into hazy ambient dream-rock reminiscent of Grouper. The mood is thick and steady, though it lacks big shifts in dynamics, leaving the set on a single emotional wavelength.
When ‘Tempest’ is briefly stopped and restarted so medics can help an audience member, ‘Waco, Texas’ follows as the main set closer. The encore then pivots toward older material, shifting the tone entirely. After a heartfelt ‘A House in Nebraska’, Anhedönia steps out from behind her green altar for the first and last time, moving into the brighter side of her discography with ‘Crush’ and ‘American Teenager’. Even though she has expressed discomfort with her most well-known tracks, their contrast with her darker material gives the finale a powerful lift. After holding the room in quiet tension for so long, their arrival feels like a release that lands with even greater impact.
