‘Dreamsicle,’ Maren Morris’ First Album Since She Left Country Music, Fails To Land Anywhere On The Billboard 200

Maren Morris’ new album Dreamsicle didn’t fare well on the charts. In fact, it’s performed quite terribly.

It’s fair to say that the “My Church” singer has “played the hokey pokey” with the country music genre, constantly putting herself in and then back out of the classification of country music (no word on if she’s turning herself around). Morris has said in the past she no longer wants to be a country music artist… just as much as she’s backtracked and said country music is a part of her.

And it’s that confusion that likely led to her newest album, Dreamsicle, being the lowest performing major label album of her career. It entirely missed the Billboard 200 ranking after it’s first full tracking frame, which is the first time that’s ever happened to her in her music career. Just for perspective, her 3 previous studio albums charted 5th, 4th and 21st, respectively, on the Billboard 200, and 1st, 1st and 2nd on the Country Albums chart.

To not even land on either with Dreamsicle… a total flop.

Though I believe it’s very easy to point a finger at Morris choosing to not sit in one genre with her latest album (Dreamsicle is more contemporary pop than it is country), she believes that the project’s struggles stem from the music industry changing the way people consume music.

Maren Morris told Vulture that it might just take time for Dreamsicle to gain traction, since she didn’t go the traditional “single route” with her album, and didn’t emphasize social media marketing all that much:

“I didn’t really have ‘singles’ from this record. The album rebuilds from the way I’ve been doing things in the past. The world of marketing has changed so much with social media, TikTok, and streaming versus radio. Everything’s almost like a slower, more organic way of building something. I’m fortunate I’ve got a fan base and I can tour, but it’s a different way than I’ve been used to doing things.

Which was: You put a single out three months before the full record comes out, you work it at radio, you watch it rise — hopefully — and then everything’s a perfect storm on album-release day. I’ve done that, and that’s the way people, I guess, still do it. But now it’s a lot different.”

I gotta ask the question… is Maren Morris really just now finding this out?

If she is, at least she’s accepting that she’ll have to adapt to the new direction the music industry is moving towards. Morris went on to say that she’s choosing to avoid looking at charts and numerical graphs for her latest album, and the struggles of Dreamsicle are acting as a bit of a wake up call for her:

“I have to be adaptable to new things and humble myself to a new way of releasing music. Radio is obviously important, but it’s not the first thing on the docket anymore. I’m trying to embrace a more independent way of doing things. I still think every song has so much worth.

But, yeah, I had to resign myself from looking at any sort of numerical graph or chart, because that wasn’t going to be my directive on this. I’ve got to almost start over, in a way.”

If you ask me, the back-and-forth nature of Maren Morris’ country music career is very much to blame for her latest project not ranking in the Billboard 200. If she wants to say she’s not a country artist anymore, that’s fine. There’s nothing wrong with moving on. However, the issue lies within the fact that she’s flip-flopped between condemning and commending the genre. She has said she doesn’t blame anyone who “stays” in the country music industry, but then implies that it’s all about the money if they do.

But in the same breath, she stated she left country because her ceiling in the genre was too low… but now she’s finding out that her ceiling was evidently the lowest when she turned her back on the genre that gave her a music career in the first place.

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