“What doesn’t kill you,” according to an old adage, “makes you stronger.” It’s true for all kinds of life challenges, but particularly for breakups. Given enough time, some people even grow strong enough to say “no” when the old flame returns.
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Megan Moroney’s new single — “6 Months Later,” released by Columbia Nashville to country radio via PlayMPE on July 14 — addresses that issue in a fit of speed and seals it with a stinging punch line, “What doesn’t kill you calls you six months later.” It recognizes a reality that feeds plenty of country songs: The person who ends a relationship will likely have regrets.
“They always come back,” Moroney says, with appropriate snark.
Moroney brought the “6 Months Later” hook up during a luxurious writing vacation with songwriters Ben Williams (“Tennessee Orange,” “I’m Not Pretty”), Rob Hatch (“I Don’t Dance,” “If Heaven Wasn’t So Far Away”) and David “Messy” Mescon. They headed off to the Bahamas on a three-story yacht with a full bar and a waitstaff in February 2025. It was the third straight year they had taken that kind of working vacation, and the first night, they mostly planned to party, though Moroney did mention her idea.
“She has more vision than any writer-artist I think I’ve ever been in the room with,” Hatch says. “In this case, she walked in and goes, ‘Guys, I want this song to be the summer tempo single of the album. I want it to be called “6 Months Later,” and I want the hook to be “What doesn’t kill you calls you six months later.” ’ ”
That was that. They worked a bit on the chorus as the libations flowed. Moroney crafted a rough melody for that section, and her friends all chipped in in leisurely fashion. “We were really just drinking, having a good time, not actually trying to write it,” she remembers.
“I was trying to figure out a word that rhymes with ‘later,’ ” Williams adds. “’Heartbreaker’ rhymes with ‘later,’ kinda, and that’s pretty cool. I don’t remember if we had any more lyrics that night, specifically, but I know that we kind of had the shell of it.”
Moroney ran some voice memos that night, and when they woke up the next morning, she reviewed their work and found that she had created the opening line for the chorus, the self-referencing “Hey, Meg, I think I want you back.” Recalling a similar move made by Miley Cyrus in the Hannah Montana song “See You Again,” Moroney thought it was fun.
“I think if [Cyrus’] song didn’t exist, I would never put my own name in a song,” Moroney says. “I grew up on that kind of stuff, so it felt right to say, ‘Hey, Meg.’ ”
The song came out fast that morning, incorporating some quirky verbiage that made the whole thing stand out. It sets a time frame, “November circa 2019,” that matches a breakup she experienced in college — “She almost always has somebody in mind,” Hatch observes — and the first verse treats the end of a romance as a metaphoric murder.
“I remember looking up the word ‘hearse,’ ” Williams says. “My whole life, I thought it was ‘hearst,’ but there’s no ‘t’ in it.”
Moroney launched the second verse with another quirk, “Oh, how the turns have tabled,” that paraphrases a Steve Carell quip from The Office that has taken on its own virtual life.
“It was kind of a Gen Z meme that’s been in my brain since I watched the show in high school,” she says. “I don’t know why that came to my brain, but it did. And then, of course, it rhymes — that’s why we came up with ‘willing and able’ right after that.”
They held that second verse to four lines — “That guy didn’t deserve eight more lines,” she deadpans — but the song’s melody also begged them to keep it short.
“The chorus was such an earworm for us,” Hatch says. “We wanted to get back to it as quick as we could.”
Moroney was intent on recognizing the original saying, “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger,” so that became the first line of a bridge that brought the story to its peak.
“You get better, hotter, stronger, and then you get grossed out,” she says. “It makes you wonder what you even saw in him. But he always calls, right? Eventually, you get grossed out by the person. That was the final piece of the story that we wanted to tell.”
Mescon whipped together a demo quickly, developing a unique slide-guitar signature lick. On day three of the vacation, Moroney and Williams listened to it during a run, and they decided to make the song faster to fit that pace. They never wrote another song during the trip — they just kept listening to “6 Months Later” and tweaking it.
Subsequently, Kristian Bush produced it during a session at Nashville’s Blackbird Studio, making mostly minor enhancements to the arrangements as they laid down the master.
“I thought Kristian just crushed it,” Williams says. “Kristian crushes everything.”
Three guitars created interlocking ’80s-rock-style arpeggio support for the first verse in the final version, highlighting the pace while allowing the lyrics to dominate. Justin Schipper handled the two-part slide guitar sig lick, and Bush developed a ricocheting tag for that riff in the space behind it.
“I [thought] she was going to probably hate it, but I put this keyboard in the choruses and in the top of the song,” he says. “There’s this melody that’s in there, and if you listen closely, it’s the same sounds they would have put on a Cure record. It sounds like a wooden mallet vibe.”
And they toyed with the tempo just a little more.
“I will speed things up till I break them, and then I pull them right back to the edge of that,” Bush says. “That’s my trick I learned from [Sugarland producer] Byron [Gallimore]. You pick the vocal that’s hardest to get out, that’s being crushed the most by speed, and we’ll just keep backing it down until she goes, ‘OK, I’m comfortable right there.’ ”
Moroney was so comfortable she knocked out the lead vocal, plus the harmonies and other random backing parts, that same day. It was so well received that Columbia Nashville issued it as a summertime single while it continues to work her Kenny Chesney collaboration, “You Had To Be There,” currently No. 29 on Country Airplay. “6 Months Later” rose quickly to No. 9 and keeps percolating, No. 15, in its seventh week on Hot Country Songs.
“Any kind of empowering tempo, feel-good song — I love those because I can’t organically write a lot of those,” Moroney says. “I am the emo cowgirl who loves sad songs. So when I get a really fun song, I get really excited about it.”
