A Life In 3 Questions With Marissa R. Moss

On the day of PORTER’s interview with author and Rolling Stone journalist Marissa R. Moss, it’s been less than 24 hours since Dolly Parton passed away, and social media is flooded with heartfelt tributes. Elsewhere, another country superstar, Kacey Musgraves, is triggering a lot of men on Instagram by descending onto stage on a pair of giant disco balls for her Middle of Nowhere tour.

Somewhere between these two moments is the story of women in country music: those who changed the game, and those still finding subversive ways to play it.

It’s a conversation Moss is in a brilliant position to lead. The recipient of the 2018 Rolling Stone Chet Flippo Award for Excellence in Country Music Journalism and named Nashville’s Best Music Reporter in 2019, she has made a career out of asking the sort of questions that the music industry would usually rather avoid, primarily about gender inequality. Her breakthrough investigation, ‘Inside Country Radio’s Dark, Secret History of Sexual Harassment and Misconduct,’ became a touchstone of Nashville’s #TimesUp reckoning. Her book, Her Country: How Women Reclaimed Country Music, centers on three trailblazers – Maren Morris, Kacey Musgraves and Mickey Guyton – and chronicles how they refused to wait for things to change and instead strode firmly into a new era of their own creation. Its lessons extend well beyond the music industry, with the key tenets being: trust your instincts, challenge the status quo, and find new ways when the odds are stacked against you.

At a time when women are commanding more visibility in the music space, are the tables finally turning? We ask Moss what a career spent questioning the rules has taught her, and what women everywhere can take from it.

We’ve had books on trailblazers like Dolly Parton and Loretta Lynn, but with Her Country, I wanted to tell a different kind of story.

I come from a background in political communications, and I’ve worked on a lot of projects focused on gender inequality. I very quickly noticed that things in Nashville were heightened when it came to women not being treated equally. Women weren’t getting airplay on country radio or headlining tours. Instead, they were being forced to compete with each other. It was women versus women for one spot. And that just didn’t sit well with me.

You kind of had to play by the rules, even as a journalist here, and I didn’t want to. I wanted to do my job. I didn’t need to pay my respects, play nice or follow a code that was given to me by the industry. So I started covering issues of gender inequality, sexual harassment and racial inequality, and how they played out in country music. I kept covering them, over and over again, and it just kind of turned into a book from there.

My second book is due next summer and it’s a little bit different; almost like a memoir. For a while, I think I talked myself out of my voice being important, but after chatting with people at readings for Her Country, I started to consider what it would be like to write a whole book where I trusted my voice. So my next book is very much my story. It’s about women in ’90s rock, and how growing up with their music shaped me.

Playing by the rules. The first time I covered the CMA Awards, I stepped into the press room and everything was extremely controlled. You couldn’t really get an artist for a one-on-one interview. And you could only ask the bigger country music superstars like Miranda Lambert silly questions.

I ended up writing a sarcastic piece in response to the whole experience, and the CMAs ended up banning me, which was weird. If you’re banning me because I was a little more inquisitive, what exactly are you trying to protect? It only made me more interested and more determined.

Now, at Rolling Stone, I love doing funny cultural reflections. It’s been really fun to dive in fully there.

It’s not Ella Langley’s job to save the world for women. Her job is just to make music. It’s the industry’s job to respond and see that people really like it when women sing and write songs. So maybe we should let them write more?

I’d also like to pass on a little bit of advice that I got from Canadian-American filmmaker and director, Jessica Edwards. She said something on a call, and I wrote it on a Post-it note: ‘Be brave. It’s all we have.’

That really stuck with me, because you get discouraged and feel like things are unfair, or like it’s taking you so much longer than the dude next to you. But you have to continue to try and be brave.

You can be brave in whatever version of yourself you want to be in terms of fashion, too. Dolly Parton took the expectations that country music placed on her and blew them up. If you were going to objectify her and call her a dumb blonde, she was going to exaggerate all of that. It’s refreshing to me to see women playing with what’s expected in terms of femininity, whether that’s refusing to wear makeup or dressing a bit more masculine.

But also: take care of yourself. If I’m trying to do everything, I end up being a bad writer, a bad mother, a bad partner, because I’m depleted and drained and I can’t do it all. Admitting to yourself that we can’t have it all, because having it all is a myth, has been more helpful to me than anything.

Marissa R. Moss’s book, Her Country: How Women Reclaimed Country Music, is out now