Country singer Megan Moroney, who starts every show by telling her audience that she has “absolutely horrible taste in men,” never takes more than a sip or two onstage. Anything more is “really scary,” she says. “I would overshare — might name-drop first and last: ‘So this song is about ...’ ”

Yet she didn’t need to spell out the inspiration for the viral hit that’s made her one of Nashville’s most promising breakout acts. Based on Instagram likes and comments, fans concluded that Georgia-born Moroney wrote her song “Tennessee Orange” about a dalliance with Morgan Wallen well before Moroney all but confirmed it when she told a radio host last year that the Tennessee Volunteers T-shirt she’s wearing in a much-discussed photo belonged to the country superstar.

A digital-marketing and music-business major at the University of Georgia, Moroney shrewdly capitalized on the social media chatter about her and Wallen to bring attention to her song and to score a major-label record deal with Sony Music Nashville, which released her debut album, “Lucky,” this past spring. But it’s her songwriting talent and the soulful scrape in her voice — not to mention the clever way she toys with the presentation of gender — that distinguish her now that she has arrived.

In the tender, waltz-time “Tennessee Orange” she’s a proud UGA Bulldog who falls so deeply for a guy from Knoxville that she dons the colors of the school’s archrival Vols to attend a football game; “I’m Not Pretty” imagines an ex’s new girlfriend scrolling through the singer’s Instagram, “zooming out, zooming in, overanalyzing like the queen of the mean girls’ committee.” The sound of the LP is vintage yet modern, full of knowing riffs on honky-tonk tradition that can suddenly clear away for a doleful ballad like “Why Johnny,” in which she wonders what kept June Carter Cash and Johnny Cash together for decades despite his philandering and substance abuse.

“She writes actual songs: verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge,” says Kenny Chesney, who recently announced that he’ll take Moroney on the road next year as an opening act. “People don’t do that so much. It’s a lot of short, choppy phrases and cuts. Megan takes her time, creates these worlds, develops the emotions inside the song. And her sense of melody is so clean and classic. It’s refreshing.”

In a year when country music is dominating pop charts — due in part to reactionary hits by Jason Aldean and Oliver Anthony — Moroney is connecting with millennial and Gen Z listeners slowly reshaping Nashville’s established power structure through the use of streaming platforms such as Spotify and Apple Music, where Moroney’s songs took off before radio programmers got on board. (On Spotify alone, “Tennessee Orange” has more than 150 million plays.) She’s also part of a broader musical moment that feels increasingly centered on young women’s emotional lives thanks to popular songwriters like Olivia Rodrigo, SZA and Taylor Swift who think about romance and ambition with a witty if jaundiced understanding of how the world works.

Moroney played her first gig while she was a student at UGA, warming up a crowd for country singer Chase Rice, whom she’d met at a philanthropy event for her sorority. Afterwards, “Chase was like, ‘You don’t even need to go to college — just come to Nashville,’ ” she remembers with a laugh. “I told my parents he said I was ready, and they were like, ‘That’s cute.’ ” She completed her degree, which involved an internship with Kristian Bush of Atlanta’s hit-making Sugarland, before moving to country music’s capital, where she initially supported herself as an influencer hawking CBD gummies and “hair products that kind of worked” on Instagram.

She hated the job but admits today that the 70,000 followers she amassed gave her a head start when she turned her attention fully to music. So did that raspy voice, which Bush says stopped him cold when she reconnected with him (after having never told him she sang) and asked him to cut a demo at his studio.

“It was the crack in it,” he says, recalling their first session together. “I told her, ‘In a perfect world, you could make your voice break right here because it’s the emotional part of the song.’ She was like, ‘Oh, cool, I can do that.’ I was stunned. She could make it go anywhere she wanted to, like Melissa Etheridge or Rod Stewart.”

With Bush producing, Moroney recorded “Tennessee Orange” and dropped it independently in September 2022; the song quickly blew up on TikTok, which drew the interest of any number of record labels, including Sony Music Nashville. Randy Goodman, the company’s CEO, remembers traveling to Louisville, Kentucky, to woo Moroney only to find her so mobbed by fans at her merchandise booth that he and members of his A&R team stepped in to help sell T-shirts.

“The deal,” he says, “was really competitive.”

Which isn’t to say that Moroney has avoided the suspicions many female musicians face in country music. Has she ever felt underestimated as a songwriter?

“Hundred percent. I wrote a song with Luke Laird and Lori McKenna and Rodney Clawson,” she says of “Kansas Anymore,” a moving love-gone-wrong number she penned with the songwriters, “and I see things all the time where people say I didn’t write a word of it.” Her response is to lean in: “If you don’t like me in dresses and boots, I’m gonna wear sparkly dresses and glittery boots just to (upset you).”

Though she says her personality is the same whether she’s glammed-up or not, Moroney acknowledges that a year of speculation about her dating life has led her to ponder the separation between her public and private selves.

“I got a therapist this year, so we’re working through it,” she says. “There might even be some happy songs coming” — a surprise, perhaps, for a woman whose debut closes with a gorgeous barroom weeper called “Sad Songs for Sad People.”

What inspired them?

“Not getting treated like (expletive),” she says, alluding to a new boyfriend. “Like I said, I don’t have good taste in men, so it’s weird to have a guy be nice to you.”

She laughs. “But honestly he could screw me over like everybody else,” she adds. “You never really know.”