MORGXN
MORGXN was born and raised in Nashville, and his first job was singing at Tootsie’s downtown. He enjoyed covering Rascal Flatts and couldn’t imagine a better place. He made his way into the world of pop and folk-pop music, which he explored on his 2024 standout Beacon. But he leaned into his roots for last year’s country-and-pop-informed Heartland, a record propelled by emotionally vulnerable ballads like the Katie Pruitt collab “Talk About It.” This year, he takes the Wrangler Remix Stage at CMA Fest and can hardly contain his excitement when I catch him mid-rehearsal over Zoom.
“I’m still the kid who was bullied for being different — I’m just now louder,” MORGXN says. “I plan to be louder, especially in spaces like CMA Fest.”
MORGXN is one of three openly queer artists playing an official CMA Fest show this year. Ty Herndon and Angie K round out the LGBTQ lineup with respective sets scheduled for the Dr Pepper Amp Stage and Fan Fair X. A fourth — acclaimed songwriter Shane McAnally — isn’t billed as an official CMA Fest performer but will play a double bill with Ashley Gorley as part of CMA’s The Songwriters Behind Country’s Biggest Hits inside Fan Fair X; similarly, heartland rocker extraordinaire Melissa Etheridge will appear in conversation with country singer Gretchen Wilson.
That meager representation is about on par with last year’s messy, stripped-back showing, suggesting a continued desire to play it safe — or perhaps court the MAGA crowd. That’s par for the course when you consider the cataclysmic divide that’s happened in country music over the past 18 months. Artists like Maren Morris and Charley Crockett continued to blast the president on social media, while many of country music’s heavy-hitters showed public displays of their support for Trump. Carrie Underwood sang at the inauguration of Trump’s second presidency, and Parker McCollum tackled Toby Keith’s “Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue (The Angry American)” at the Commander-in-Chief Ball.
MORGXN responds to those stats, saying what we’re all thinking.
“That’s not enough,” he says. “It is Pride Month, and it doesn’t have to be a Pride stage to be equal. It’s just seeing more people represented all across the board. That’s the thing I’m fighting for.”
At least from the perspective of its business community, Nashville is feeling like a far less welcoming place for the queer community today. Following several sponsors dropping out last year — a list that includes big names like Dollar General, Nissan, Jack Daniel’s and Vanderbilt University Medical Center — Nashville Pride suffered a major financial setback, and this year’s event is significantly shorter. The state legislature has continued to openly attempt shoving the LGBTQ community toward the fringes. Gov. Bill Lee recently signed a resolution declaring June “Nuclear Family Month,” a move that might not have as much of an impact as laws limiting trans healthcare, but one that stings nonetheless.
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“There’s no point in that,” MORGXN says. “It’s just pure meanness. What I want to bring to the stage is love — like, pure love. I also have a non-cis male band. It is important to me that representation happens, not just through me, but through everyone that I have onstage.”
While preaching nothing but love from the stage, he doesn’t fear for himself so much as one person in his life: his mother. “She is sitting there worrying that something might happen to her son,” he says. “That makes me emotional.”
Cracks are appearing in the MAGA firmament (see: former staunch MAGA Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene turning on the administration). When the movement eventually falls apart, MORGXN believes it’s going to take a lot of work on the part of country artists and people who used to believe in Trump policies to come back from the damage done.
“It’s hard for me to look at the redemption tour that Marjorie is on,” he says, after a pause. “You’ve hurt us. But I see you waking up. You have apologizing to do. You have hurt a lot of people … just for sport.”
For now, MORGXN beams when talking about CMA Fest and what he has planned for his set.
“We just started rehearsal, so I’m only like 10 minutes into it. Getting to play these songs in downtown Nashville at CMA Fest … I grew up singing at a bar two blocks away. I wrote a song about the heartland that I believe in. And that’s what I’m gonna sing about. That feels important to me.”
Diving into the who, what, when, where and why of the two major music festivals that hit Middle Tennessee at the start of summer
