Kylie Morgan Is 'Embracing the Imperfections' with Single 'Break Things': It's 'Me in a Nutshell'

The rising country star was named one of CMT's "Next Women of Country" for 2020

Published on August 24, 2020 09:00 AM

As a kid growing up in Oklahoma, Kylie Morgan would come home from school and immediately turn on CMT to dance and sing along to Reba McIntire and Shania Twain's music videos.

"I remember thinking, 'Oh, I would give anything to be on there one day,'" Morgan, 25, tells PEOPLE exclusively. "While other little girls were planning their wedding, I was planning my record."

And Morgan really did do everything in her power to become one of those women. At 12 years old, she got her first guitar and told her mom she was going to skip college and become a country music singer.

"Once she got her breath back and realized how serious I was, she supported me 100 percent," Morgan says. "I think she saw how driven I was and how much I loved it. There really was no other choice for me."

kylie morgan — Kylie Morgan. Katie Kauss

At 15, Morgan started playing small shows and traveling back and forth from her hometown to Nashville to co-write songs with Walker Hayes and learn the music business.

"[Music] was my form of therapy," Morgan says in a new episode of "Hometown Heartland" which premiered exclusively with PEOPLE. "If I was going through something, if I was in a fight with one of my friends, if I had lost a family member — whatever the situation was, I would come home and I could either write about it or I could just play music and forget about it for a little bit."

Because it was her way of processing her feelings, Morgan has never shied away from being "completely transparent" in her music.

"After Taylor Swift started releasing songs at 16 I was like 'I don't have to wait until I am in my 20s to start this process,'" Morgan says. "If she could say those things and I was relating to them, I felt like I could say things that other people could relate to as well."

At 19, she moved to Nashville permanently and began her career as a songwriter, eventually joining the team at SmackSongs, working alongside Shane McAnally. But over the past year, many of the dreams Morgan had as a little girl in Oklahoma manifested into reality.

She signed a record deal, opened shows for artists like Dan + Shay and Maren Morris, was named one of CMT's 2020 Next Women of Country and her hit song, "Break Things" is now averaging a million streams a week.

The song, she says, is an "anthem" for all of the clumsy people like herself who can't make it through a night without breaking something.

"I got the idea for the song when I was out shopping with a girlfriend and I saw this wine glass that said 'I Break Things.' I was like 'I need to buy that.' Then I was like, 'Actually, I need to write that,'" she says. "It's all about embracing the imperfections, and it really is me in a nutshell. The song basically wrote and recorded itself."

That's likely because she drew from her own experiences. In the first verse, Morgan sings, "Don't hand me the keys to your pickup truck 'cause I drive like I drink and I only drink from plastic cups.'"

"That's my favorite line in the whole song," she tells PEOPLE. "I am an awful driver, first of all, and thank God my dad fixes cars for a living because I think God knew I would be wrecking them."

When she first released the song, Morgan had plans to go on a radio tour and do promotions for the single across America, but then the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and the world was put on hold, meaning so were the plans for "Break Things."

"I'll be honest, at first I was so heartbroken about everything," she says. "It all felt so close and then in a matter of days it felt further away than ever. I cried for a few days, but then I was like 'OK, suck it up, Kylie. This isn't just affecting me. It's the whole world, and in the scheme of things, life could be a whole lot worse.'"

She continues, "I just gave it up to God because his timing is so much better than mine. Looking back on it, I thank God we didn't go to radio. I thank God that my song didn't fail because it didn't even have the chance to. It just started blowing up on streaming and that may never have happened had we gone through with the original plan."

While the pandemic threw a loop in the song's release, it didn't stop the shoot for her "Break Things" music video, which she still recalls as one of the "most surreal" days of her life.

"There was just an energy about that day I can barely even describe," she says. "I was getting my hair and makeup done and we were all wearing masks. There was this monitor showing everything being set up, and I remember thinking 'I can't believe they're doing all of this for me. All of the smiles you see in that video are 100 percent authentic because I was so excited to be there.'"

During the video, Morgan breaks records, vases and glass, and even fulfills a dream of smashing a guitar.

In a Behind-the-Scenes video for "Break Things" which premiered exclusively with PEOPLE, Morgan says that on shoot day, she received a text from her mom that read, "Little Girl, you’ve been dreaming about this since you were a baby and I am so excited that the day is finally here."

However, it wasn't until the video for the song premiered on CMT in early August that all of her recent successes truly came full circle.

"My mom called me at like 9:30 a.m. and I was like, 'First of all, Mom, you know not to call before 10,' and she was like, 'I don't even care because I just saw your video on CMT,'" Morgan says. "In that moment I was taken right back to dancing to Shania and Reba on the pink carpet in the green house I grew up in. Those women shaped who I am, and to even be recognized as a woman in country music is something I will never take for granted."