Megan Moroney chose the songs for her second full-length album because they resonated with her deeply, not because of outside opinions or perceived hit potential. “This is my life, and no one wants me to make a better second album than me, and I’m going to put out whatever songs I like,” she tells Apple Music. “I’m the one that has to perform these songs. I’m proud of them. And if it’s not your cup of tea, then good thing there’s a million artists out there.”
That said, Am I Okay? shows no signs of a sophomore slump. Like its predecessor, the 2023 breakout Lucky, the collection pulls together feisty kiss-offs and aching ballads—the latter a product of Moroney’s winking, self-professed “emo cowgirl” persona. Highlights on the album include the sweet and optimistic title track, on which Moroney falls for “a 6'2" dream,” and the swaggering rock anthem “Indifferent.” More serious moments show a weightier side to Moroney’s songwriting, like the heartbreaking, grief-stricken “Heaven by Noon” and the vulnerable closer “Hell of a Show.” Below, Moroney shares insight into several key tracks.
“Am I Okay?”
“People are probably going to think it’s going to be a heart-wrenching song, but it’s just not. It’s like you’re actually happy for once and you’re asking yourself, ‘Oh my God. Am I OK?’ That’s how I felt at one time. I think that when I had hope in a relationship with this guy, it lasted for a month or two until he showed his true colors. But we live and we learn. We got a good song out of it, and then we moved on.”
“No Caller ID”
“I was playing it at the Lucky shows. I was kind of giving them that treat, like an unreleased song [where] the only place you could hear it was at the live shows. But then, of course, it got posted on TikTok, and several TikToks of that song blew up. So, I thought that people cared about the song, but I didn’t know it was going to take off the way it did, obviously.”
“Indifferent”
“A song like ‘Indifferent,’ it was just kind of what I was going through at the time. But I think in the studio…I’m like, ‘OK, because this song turned into what it is, we need to make this rock. We need to make it punch really hard, because this is going to be crazy at live shows.’ So, it’s kind of like after the song was written, just making sure in the studio it was executed the way that we wanted it to be.”
“Miss Universe”
“‘Miss Universe’ is basically just a story about when you want your ex to downgrade and then they don’t, and you’re like, ‘Oh.’ So, that’s kind of just that feeling. I’m like, ‘How did you pull her?’ So, yeah, that is just kind of a story about how you want them to downgrade and then they don’t. They very much upgrade.”
“Heaven by Noon”
I had a title, ‘Heaven by Noon,’ and I brought it to Jessie Jo Dillon and Matt Jenkins. We wrote ‘Girl in the Mirror’ together, which is also a heart-wrenching song. So, I knew if we were going to write a heart-wrencher that I needed to have those two help me out with it. And we kind of used our own experiences in our own lives to write this song, but it was just the idea of when you lose someone, you don’t know it’s going to be the last time. A lot of people don’t know this, but my uncle died on 9/11, so I thought about my aunt when I was writing that song because the last thing they talked about was an oil change. And that’s probably not what she would’ve wanted to say to him if she knew it was going to be the last time.”
“Hell of a Show”
“It was a situation that I was in for a while, and it was—I knew it was toxic. I kept hoping that it would get better, but it got to a point where I wrote it as a poem in the back of my bus right after a show, and then I picked up my guitar because my guitar was still onstage or whatever, so I didn’t have it. But then I picked up a guitar and put a melody to it after. It was just one of those situations where I’m like, ‘I have a sold-out tour. It’s my debut album, sold out. People are showing up at 10 am. They’ve got shirts on. It’s like everything I’ve ever wanted, and I am crying before I go onstage because of an asshole.’ And it’s like, ‘You are ruining good moments for me.’”
