From Writing Partners to Exes: How Maren Morris and Ryan Hurd Keep the Music Alive

There’s something almost too perfectly country about Maren Morris and Ryan Hurd’s story. They met in a writing session. They fell in love. They married. They split. And then—most unexpectedly—they went back to the studio together anyway.

The journey from 2013 writing partners to 2020 parents to 2023 exes isn’t the kind of arc you’d typically expect to end in collaboration. But in July 2026, Morris and Hurd reunited to rerecord“We Can’t Be Friends,”a previously unreleased track from 2016 that’s being included on the 10th anniversary edition of Morris’debut album, Hero: A Second Wind. The song itself is about hooking up with an ex—which makes the whole thing either brilliantly meta or slightly uncomfortable, depending on how you look at it.

What’s remarkable isn’t that they divorced (celebrity splits happen constantly). It’s that they’ve genuinely figured out how to exist in the same creative space after everything fell apart. Morris was candid about the weirdness of it all, calling the experience“weird”and“hilarious”given how much their relationship has shifted. But she and Hurd have“gotten to the point”where they can move past the awkwardness and focus on what brought them together in the first place: the music itself.

“He sang backgrounds on it, and so did Caitlyn,”Morris explained during an Apple Music interview with Kelleigh Bannan.“It’s almost like we just got to time warp, and obviously so much has changed.”Their 2023 divorce was finalized in January 2024 on grounds of irreconcilable differences, and by June 2025, Morris was already talking about how coparenting“has been going well.”Less than a year later, they’re back in the studio together—not as husband and wife, but as the talented songwriters who always understood each other’s craft.

The whole situation speaks to something bigger about how people in the music industry navigate personal relationships when the work is so deeply intertwined with the heart. Morris and Hurd weren’t just married; they were collaborators who wrote some of their best material together, including“Chasing After You,”which earned them joint Grammy and CMA nominations. Their professional legacy didn’t need to die when their marriage did. And Morris seems determined to honor that reality.“I would hope we can laugh stuff off and not expire things that were good, like these songs. I think that we’re above that,”she said. That’s not just acceptance. That’s maturity.

It’s worth asking yourself: Could you do what they’re doing? Could you look past the hurt, the disappointment, the changed plans, and walk into a room to create something beautiful with someone who knows all your worst moments? That’s the story here—not that a couple broke up, but that two artists remembered why they mattered to each other in the first place.