Moroney hadn’t ever attempted to write a song, but soon found it came easy to her. She describes herself as “emotional and sensitive” (she’s a Libra), and the lyrics poured out of her. She performed an original song to open for Rice, and everything changed.

“I was like, well, this is what I’m going to do with my life. I don’t know how I’m going to figure it out, but I will,” she says.

Still, she took things slowly. She finished her degree, and moved to Nashville during the pandemic in 2020, figuring that if she just ended up working in music marketing, that would be great too.

“I wasn’t like, I’m going to be this country music superstar,” she says. “My brain just never went there. It was just like, I know that my plan after college is to move to Nashville.”

She supported herself by working as an influencer, which began in college. After realizing they were gaining followers by posting about their football gameday outfits and other parts of campus life, Moroney and some of her other friends began to lean into it.

“It started with us just getting free stuff and we were like, duh, I don’t want to have to pay for clothes. I’m broke,” she says.

By the time she moved to Nashville, Moroney was making money from brand deals with companies like Bud Light.

“I think a lot of people didn’t take me seriously when I moved to Nashville because when they would go to my Instagram, I’d be like, I just wrote this song, and then the next post would use my code for 20% off. It’s like, what is this girl doing?” she jokes. But she realized that it was a good way to pay the bills.

“I feel like not having to be like, a bartender from 9:00 pm to 3:00 am, it allowed me to have the mental space to be able to write and get better,” she says. “I don’t think I could do that if I was exhausted from working night shifts…I would just be useless probably.”

Once she got to Nashville, her career began to take off. Songwriting continued to come naturally to her. In fact, she wrote her first hit, “Wonder,” after a conversation with her best friend, Natalie, at the beach.

“She was fighting with this dude and I was like, if he really loved you and cared about you, you wouldn’t be wondering if he did,” she says. “…I had a margarita in hand. I walked down the beach. I didn’t even write the song on a guitar. I wrote it like acapella, just out loud, literally in the ocean with the margarita in my hand.” She later posted the song to TikTok, where it went viral, her first song to hit the zeitgeist.

“I was just in my car singing it and everyone liked it,” she says. “And then when I put that out, the reaction to that, I was like, okay, I think something here is interesting.”