Review: Rising country star Megan Moroney sets records at Minneapolis Armory

Rising country star Megan Moroney set three records Thursday night at the sold-out Armory in Minneapolis:

1) for the most merchandise sold at an Armory concert (topping Gracie Abrams);

2) for the most singingalong-est crowd at the Armory (topping Olivia Rodrigo);

3) for the longest time to clear security at the Armory because concertgoers had to remove their cowboy boots and hats before going through metal detectors. Do you know how many young women wore white cowgirl boots like Moroney does? That might be a record, too.

The sound of 7,000 mostly tween, teen and young women (and their moms) singing along at the top of their lungs makes 95 minutes of mostly ballads — sad ones, at that — seem more energetic than it should, making the show seem better than its pacing and conception.

Moroney’s Am I Okay Tour was a slick modern country presentation with modest production that left the crowd buzzing on a too-late-to-be-out school night, thanks to Moroney’s smartly crafted songs and her winsome persona.

A sparkly vision in sky blue and rhinestones, Moroney, 27, turned on the charm by waving cutely, rolling her eyes and sashaying around the stage in her tall white cowgirl that almost reached her knees. Her cutest moment came when she brought a young fan named Regan onstage during “Miss Universe” and crowned the aspiring dermatologist Miss Am I Okay Minneapolis.

Moroney is early Taylor Swift meets Olivia Rodrigo with the feistiness of Shania Twain and the girliness of Sabrina Carpenter but without any of the energy of all of the above.

The Georgia native calls her sound “emo cowgirl,” because she traffics in emotional sensitivity and vulnerability with country tropes and sensibilities.

She’s had more no-good boyfriends than a jukebox full of Swift songs. Or maybe it was just one guy who gave her endless grief (and material), or just her imagination. Whatever, it makes for stand-out country/pop songs like “I’m Not Pretty,” “No Caller ID” and “Girl in the Mirror.”

And Moroney delivered them in a slightly raspy voice with palpable ache but not enough melodrama to make you think she’d been drowning her sorrows at a bar.

The singer/songwriter, who opened for Kenny Chesney last year at U.S. Bank Stadium, used her practiced patter to break up the balladic pacing. Before singing “Mama I Lied,” she explained that her mother is her best friend to whom she tells everything — just not always in a timely manner.

At one point, Moroney pointed out that she thought you’d become an accountant. But her dream was to create music even though she didn’t write her first song until she was 19. If you dream it, she told the crowd, go for it.

Backed by a five-person band, Moroney covered a remarkable 17 songs in the first hour, and 25 tunes all together. It’s too bad she didn’t have a pedal steel guitar player; those defining sounds from her recordings were instead delivered by a slide guitarist in concert.

To be honest, Moroney’s material, drawn from her two albums, is not all ballads. There was plenty of vitality in the two opening numbers, the almost rocking “Man on the Moon” and the empowering “Indifferent,” with its chorus punctuated with noisy guitar power chords.

“Lucky,” the title track of her 2023 debut album, offered some mid-show barroom swagger, “Bless Your Heart,” a sarcastic ode to naysayers, brought a jauntiness and the celebratory friendship anthem “The Girls,” her only happy song, provided a much-needed, late-show pick me up.

And the encore of the confetti-showered “Am I Okay,” the title song from her 2024 sophomore LP, was a festive finale and maybe the night’s loudest singalong. But it might have been more impactful to follow that with the self-love ballad “Girl in the Mirror” to underscore the most important lesson that Moroney has learned: “You can’t love the boy more than you love the girl in the mirror.”