“I was the girl that, you know, in middle school, I didn’t get invited to the party.”
Megan Moroney said that to a stadium full of fans in Charleston, South Carolina, on Sept. 30, 2025. She was about to play a ballad nobody could buy yet. A little over a year later, that ballad has her in the running for one of the biggest prizes in country music.
On Tuesday, Nov. 10, the Country Music Association added Megan to the performers for the 60th CMA Awards. Luke Combs, Chris Stapleton, Vince Gill and host Lainey Wilson were named the same day. The show airs live from Bridgestone Arena in Nashville on Wednesday, Nov. 18, at 8 p.m. ET on ABC.
Megan has two nominations this year. She is up for Female Vocalist of the Year against Lainey, Miranda Lambert, Ella Langley and Kacey Musgraves. Her other nod is Song of the Year for “Beautiful Things,” which she wrote with Jessi Alexander, Jessie Jo Dillon and Connie Harrington. The CMA has not said which song she will sing on the show.
If the name is new to you, Megan grew up in Douglasville, Georgia, just west of Atlanta. She broke through in 2022 with “Tennessee Orange.” Her third album, “Cloud 9,” came out this February and became her first No. 1 on the Billboard 200.
“Beautiful Things” is the quiet one on that record. The first verse is about being left out by friends, and the second is about a first broken heart. Megan lived some of it herself, as she told the Charleston crowd. Whiskey Riff reported that in an interview that same month, she said it is the one song in her catalog she would call written for herself.
She had somebody else in mind when she started it, though.
“It’s a song that I wrote for my niece, actually,” she said from the stage in Charleston. The little girl was a baby when the idea came. “She’s so perfect, and I just never want anything sad to happen to her.”
Megan had a name for the mood she was in when she wrote it: “crazy auntie mode.”
Country Now reported in August 2025 that her niece had just turned 2 when Megan previewed the song at an acoustic set for VIP ticket holders. “I have to write a song so that she can listen to it when that happens and she feels no sadness ever,” Megan said that night. She also joked that she will be a “nightmare of a mom” someday.
She told the story again at a live taping of Southern Living’s “Biscuits & Jam” podcast in New York with editor Sid Evans. Her niece, she admitted, is still far too young to understand a word of it. “The hope of writing that song was that if and when she needs it, she has it.”
Megan’s own channel posted the Charleston performance. Whiskey Riff and iHeartCountry both shared this clip when they reported what she told the crowd.
Megan sings “Beautiful Things” for the Charleston crowd
Before she started playing, she had a few words for everybody else in the building. “I think this song is just a great reminder that we’re all going through something, so just be nice to each other.”
The studio version came out in October 2025. The official lyric video lets you follow every word of the advice she is saving for later.
The official lyric video for “Beautiful Things”
Song of the Year goes to the songwriters, so a win on Nov. 18 would send Megan and her three co-writers to the podium together. The one listener it was written for will probably be in bed by then.