In the seven years since the release of the Highwomen’s self-titled debut LP, the quartet of Brandi Carlile, Natalie Hemby, Maren Morris, and Amanda Shires have lived enough life to fill endless classic country songs: babies born and others grown, divorces filed and finalized, pandemics weathered. They’ve won Grammys and released eight solo albums. They’ve lost loved ones.
“And a uterus!” quips Natalie Hemby, sitting in the green room between rehearsals with her bandmates. Only a group like the Highwomen, filled with artists insistent on sharing women’s stories in a genre where beer, truck, and fishing songs by men rule country radio playlists, could kick things off with a joke about a hysterectomy.
It’s the Thursday before the Highwomen are set to take the stage as part of Carlile’s Echoes Through the Canyon run at the Gorge in Washington state, and the champagne (alongside pre-champagne IV hydration) is already flowing. This is the first time the band has reunited to perform since their last show at this same venue in 2023, which they just released as a digital-only live album. Their custom Nudie suits are pressed, their kids are in tow and, according to Shires, they’ll be playing under a full moon.
“Shires is going to be howling at it,” Carlile says. “I guarantee you that.” Shires doesn’t argue.
Things have changed for the Highwomen, but they’ve changed for the genre, too. In the years since the band came together to challenge country radio’s persistent gender imbalance, there has been some significant headway. Ella Langely has been breaking numerous records with “Choosin’ Texas,” and both Lainey Wilson and Megan Moroney have dominated award shows, album sales, and, at times, the airwaves. Collaboration, not competition — a core tenant of the Highwomen’s philosophy — is rampant. Women are producing one another’s records, writing together, and fighting to make space for many when the default is one, or even none. Even Miranda Lambert and Kacey Musgraves have buried the hatchet. The Highwomen may not have persuaded radio programmers to add their songs into rotation, but their mission has permeated deeply.
Despite all that success, the outlook at country radio is still far too dismal. This week, there are only two songs by women in the Mediabase Top 20 for country airplay. Queer voices are rare, while trans artists and Black women are almost nonexistent. These days, though, the Highwomen are less concerned about radio and more optimistic about the power of community when it comes to country music. When they take the stage a few days later, they’ll be joined by a group that spans genres and generations: Bonnie Raitt, Wynonna Judd, Sheryl Crow, Allison Russell, Linda Perry, and Brittney Spencer, and even their own kids during “Only Child.” Creating a crowded table is always part of the mix.
“There’s no shortage of talent, just shortage of opportunities,” says Shires, who came up with the idea for the Highwomen after an ill-fated call to a country radio station, asking them to play more women. “Do you want to be up there in your lonely castle, or have a bunch of friends?”
The Highwomen will next appear at Morris’s July 19 Red Rocks Amphitheatre performance, where she’ll be joined by the Colorado Symphony (“It’s going to be insane,” Morris says. “I’m obviously recording it”). And a new album is brewing. They’re hashing out plans to write this summer, and lighting up the group text thread with ideas.
“The four of us together,” Shires says, “is the closest thing we have to a superpower.”
The resounding response to your reunion seems to be, “Thank God, we need this right now.” What do you think it is about this moment that feels so right for a Highwomen return? It’s been seven years since we met on the tour bus at the “Redesigning Women” video shoot.
Maren Morris: I know why I need it. I’m coming to the end of a lot of big chapters and an album cycle, and a lot of tough things these last few years. I’m right there with the fans, and the new ones that have discovered us recently. Maybe it’s my algorithm on TikTok, but every other video is from [the 2023] show and it’s refreshing and really needed right now.
Brandi Carlile: I like where we all are as friends right now, too. We met to be in a band — it was all new. It was like a love affair, but we didn’t really know each other. We’ve been through so much in the past seven years that, no strings attached, we’ve been calling each other and going, “Hey, are you okay? Let’s talk about what you’ve gone through.” We kind of got married, and then became partners.
Is it different coming to the stage knowing one another so well, and having been through so much personally?
Amanda Shires: More grey hairs and better boundaries.
Carlile: I’m still boundary-less.
Shires: I feel like this go-around, we have less to prove and more to enjoy, not in relation to the world or anything, just as a group.
Morris: The pressure’s off. We can just enjoy each other and what we’ve endured, and the solo endeavors we’ve had. It was such a relief to be in a band and not have to hold that attention all on your own shoulders. I also think anytime we’re in a crowd that’s Brandi’s, it’s a crowd that she and the artists that she puts on the line have cultivated. So you just know you’re in for a really beautiful, safe, spiritual weekend.
Shires: She creates an environment where people are free to be themselves, which is not an easy thing to do because it takes a lot of trust to feel free.
Morris: You lose people along the way too, as you cultivate a fanbase and become more yourself as an artist. You lose some, but then gain lifers.
Carlile: That is something that [Maren] has experienced a lot for sure, all of us have at different times, and it’s such a hard thing to contend with because nobody becomes an entertainer to alienate people. But at some point, you have got to stand for something, or you fall for anything. Standing up for ourselves and losing folks but finding those who need it is a powerful thing. I’ve been watching Maren’s moves and I’m feeling really proud of her.
Morris: That means so much coming from you. All of you guys have been there for me. When we started this, it was a positive way of addressing the lack of stories being told in the country mainstream. Obviously, that’s still a factor, but I think then we had something to prove. A manifesto, almost.
Carlile: At the time, it was remarkable that [Maren] was breaking through. But I was just incredulous. I couldn’t believe that there were absolutely no women going to Number One on radio in country music. I remember Dave Cobb wanted [Hemby] to write us a hit song so bad. She sent in the demo for “Crowded Table,” and I thought, “Holy hell, that’s got to be it!” And he’s like, “Maybe an up-tempo one.” And then she drops “Redesigning Women” like it’s nothing. But these two songs, or beginnings of songs, became the sound of our band because of the way she was singing in the demos, which is the way we all now sing in unison.
It’s unique to have homed in on a “band sound” so early on, especially when you all have such identifiable and developed solo careers.
Carlile: We sound like us. I really noticed it mixing this live album. Like, “We have a real musical identity.” We got together for a purpose, and it became so musical, and now it’s personal. To have all three of those things line up right now, it feels really good. Because I don’t know about you guys, but when I drop a Highwomen song into the set, the crowd goes nuts.
Shires: There’s something bigger than all of us when we all do this thing.
Natalie Hemby: I do feel like there’s a divine thread between all four of us.
You always spoke about the Highwomen being a movement as much as a band, too. Has that vision, and approach to inclusivity, morphed at all over the years?
Shires: It is still the same, with more room at the table and a better playlist. I think there’s still work to do, that’s what I think.
Carlile: I think everybody has a different reason for perpetuating the concept of the Highwomen now. One thing I like about a movement, and the fact that people are more powerful en masse, with their voices amplified whether they’re in unison or not, is that feeling of getting the door open just enough to let other people in. It’s something I’ve always really loved to do with my career and my art, and it’s much cooler and so much more fun to do with four people. We’re as dedicated to platforming and amplifying women and marginalized people as we always were, and we do that by building community with each other and with other people. That’s what our shows are going to be, and that’s what our music’s going to be.
Morris: What we stand for, what we’re about, is the people we bring. I think every one of our shows has been a collaborative effort with our friends joining as well. We’ve said it’s sort of like musical chairs, whether it’s Brittney Spencer, Yola, Sheryl Crow, we’ve had people come in and help lift up the songs and lift each other up.
Your personal bandmates aside, do we have a place for men in the Highwomen?
Carlile: We need men to perpetuate the movement. I’m not a man, but I can say I’m raising daughters, and I don’t want them to hear the misogynistic and homogenous messaging in some modern country music. I want them to hear the messaging that I grew up hearing in Nineties country music, you know what I mean? I don’t have to be a dad to know that I want my daughters’ anthems to empower them instead of shrink them into a pair of shorts in a passenger seat of someone’s pickup truck.
Country radio does sound a little different now than it did in 2019. Ella Langley, Megan Moroney, and Lainey Wilson have all had breakthroughs. “Chosin’ Texas,” of course, is huge. But it’s still such a small percentage of what actually gets played.
Carlile: Those songs are so good. I can’t them out of my head. You should be hearing them nonstop.
Hemby: In the Top 50, there’s only ever five or six girls.
Morris: And the girls have to be outstanding. We have to be unique. We have to look different. We have to be eight times better for half the pay and half the coverage.
Shires: And the scrutiny is different.
Morris: The level of songwriting has to be the highest caliber. We have to do all that to get noticed by an audience or label, but the safest bet is always finding a dude that sounds like eight other dudes, and the girls are the risks they take. Ella, Lainey, Meg, they all sound completely different from each other. The girls always have. Carrie didn’t sound like Miranda. Faith didn’t sound like Martina.
Carlile: Tanya [Tucker] always says the exact same thing. Not to be Pollyanna about everything, but it’s like when Maren was totally dominating in country music, and didn’t have to join the band because you know there aren’t that many spots and you’ve had one, and you made it inside the door. It’s very tempting not to hold the door open or not join up with a community or movement. I did a thing a couple of weeks ago at Billboard Women in Music and Lainey gave Ella an award, and they’re real friends. It’s really uplifting to see that.
Hemby: It’s like Lainey said at that awards show: “Y’all need to stop pitting women against each other.” I really love to see it.
Carlile: And when women are like, “Hey, I won’t be the only one, who else is on this bill?”
Morris: I don’t want to pull the ladder up behind me. I do wonder if the Highwomen could have been created in the year like 2026 where there are women dominating the airwaves, finally.
Shires: I think we were part of a cultural thing at the time, with us having the lady balls to do stuff.
Hemby: The laybs.
I think you can also draw a line from a song like “Chosin’ Texas” back to the Highwomen. Radio programmers may have not played your songs much, if at all, but you helped warm them up both to women’s perspectives and to a more twangy, classically country sound. Brandi, I remember you were really set on trying to get the band on the airwaves.
Carlile: Maren said, “That’s never going to happen,” and I was like, “It will!”
Morris: The hopefulness [Brandi] had was because you grew up with a very different version of [country], and then when you come against the machine of it you realize, if you’re let in, you probably should just shut your mouth because you’re lucky to be there. But I just realized this is not the dream I had when I was singing into a shampoo bottle. I wasn’t trying to rain on anyone’s parade when I told Brandi, “Do the radio tour interviews, but I don’t think they have the bravery to go and give it a spin.”
Carlile: They might not even have power to do it. They might be so corporately influenced.
Shires: Since the record, you see more women in positions we didn’t see before. There are more women engineers, more women producing. And more in radio. Maybe we keep pushing and whatever happens, happens. I’m just trying to stay hopeful.
Carlile: I just don’t need to get called “country music.”
Morris: I’m fine being called anything. I don’t think I have the same sort of jadedness or bulldog headedness I had seven years ago. I don’t know if I’m worn down or wiser, maybe both. Motherhood has changed me. Even though I can still absolutely go there and be a bitch, I do it with a softer touch now. It’s one of those projects I hope is in my biography as a whole eight chapters. Every time I listen to these songs, it reminds me of the cozy, nostalgic country I grew up on where I felt really safe and at home even though we are expressing so much activism and humor and pain and life. My nervous system feels so regulated when I listen to it.
Shires: And I don’t feel like we have to beat everybody on the head with what we’re trying to do. Enough people know what we’re trying to do, and it is freeing. I can’t wait to see where it takes us.
Hemby: Now that radio isn’t really the goal. It’s like the world is our oyster.
Carlile: Those goal posts have moved as well. What even is a successful career? We have to figure it out again. It’s a new music industry since we did this before.
The Highwomen, joined by Sheryl Crow, perform at the Gorge in Washington in May 2026. Photo: Skyler Barberio*
You see the impact of the band, though: from how enduring the album itself has been to the artists the Highwomen has inspired, like queer country trio the Cowgays.
Shires: The ripple effect is awesome, but sometimes I think it’d be nice if it would have made a bigger dip, but also I realize how hard that is with a lot of folks still in the way.
Hemby: The Highwomen have not had a “big hit” if you will from radio. But I’ve seen more people, more children’s choirs sing “Crowded Table.” Lots of churches, lots of people singing it at their graduations. That is success, that is how you have staying power. Yes, I want more women on radio, but it goes beyond that. It has to be good songs. It has to be great music. It’s got to be the right time.
Carlile: We didn’t come through and say, “Play us just because we’re four women.” It was, “Try and deny this album.” It’s going to stand the test of time and it’s easily one of the greatest projects I’ve ever been a part of. It’s my kids’ favorite album.
Hemby: It preaches all kinds of messages, but the album isn’t preachy. It’s the things that we’ve lived. We’ve lived through our fathers passing away. We’ve lived through being a mom who doesn’t want to get up in the morning, and wants to go out on the road. We’ve been through all kinds of things. I think that’s why it spoke to a lot of people.
Carlile: And we have a lot to say again. My life is really different. Everyone’s a little gayer.
Speaking of…Maren, you’ve come out since the album was first released. Do you feel like you can sing “If She Ever Leaves Me” a little more freely now?
Carlile: I will say I always thought of [Maren] when I sang that line, “by the third drink, you’ll find out she’s mine.”
Morris: Oh, we’re outing some things! I will sing it differently this time. Everyone’s a little bit gay [sings]. Except Natalie.
Hemby: I’m everyone’s mom.
Carlile: You and Joni are the straightest women I know.
Hemby: But I know so many straight women who have a crush on [Brandi].
And now, to the question on everyone’s mind: What’s the status of a new album?
Morris: Amanda already came up with album two’s name, what was it?
Shires: It’s just a placeholder: Saloon Psychosis. Me and Natalie had some ideas the other day.
Carlile: I see lyrics on the text thread. We’re all talking about writing and how to contribute and when our schedules will allow, but we’re going to prioritize it and we’re going to get together with a new round of songs.
Morris: When I’m done touring this summer, I don’t have shit for the first time in ten years.
Shires: Let’s do it. We’ve lived a lot. We’ve got more stories to tell, and we can’t be defined by ten songs.
