Fresh Air - An exposé of the plastic industry

Episode Date: April 1, 2026

In award-winning journalist Beth Gardiner’s new book, ‘Plastic Inc.,’ she traces how plastic went from a wartime miracle to the survival strategy of the fossil fuel industry. What Gardiner found after years of reporting is that while millions of us were recycling and using less fuel, the companies that make plastic are producing more to make up for it. She spoke with Tonya Mosley about recycling, microplastics in the human body, and the environmental impact.   Rock critic Ken Tucker reviews the new album from Megan Moroney, ‘Cloud 9.’To manage podcast ad preferences, review the links below:See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

This is Fresh Air. I'm Tanya Mosley. Think about everything you've touched today, your toothbrush, your coffee cup, the phone in your hand, the shoes on your feet. Chances are almost all of it is made of plastic or contained some element of it. Plastic was first used to insulate radar cables during World War II, and scientists soon found other uses for it. And after the war, it moved into our kitchens and our cars, our clothing, and our medicine. By the 1950s, companies were racing to make plastic disposable, and a throwaway culture was born. My guest today is Beth Gardner, a journalist and author of the new book, Plastic Inc, the secret history and shocking future of Big Oil's biggest bet. In it, she argues that while millions of us have been trying

to use less plastic, the fossil fuel industry has been making more. Plastic, she says, says, is big oils plan B. The less we use, the more they make. Beth Gartner, welcome to fresh air. Thank you so much. It's a pleasure to be here. So, Beth, you, like so many of us, were doing all the things you thought were right. You were separating your plastic for recycling and carrying these canvas bags and trying to use less. When did you realize none of it was going to make a dent in what these companies were doing? Well, it was about seven or eight years ago, and I still remember the morning that I saw this headline. It was an article in The Guardian about the plastic and petrochemical industry.

That particular story was specific to plastic producers in the United States. And it said that because of fracking, which was such an interesting connection to me, some of these huge companies like ExxonMobil and Shell were ramping up to actually actually make 40% I think it was more plastic in the U.S. in the coming handful of years. And, I mean, it just felt like kind of a gut punch because, like you said, I've always been the person kind of carrying my bags to the store. I feel bad if I forget to bring them. I'm toting around my metal water bottle. I have it sitting right here. And I mean, I'm just one individual, right? But there's so many people like me who just sort of feel.

on some level, like there's something wrong. Like we get that there's something really unsustainable about our relationship with plastic and its extreme proliferation in the world around us. The idea that while we are sort of as individuals trying to reduce our own use of plastic, that this huge global, extremely wealthy and powerful industry was actually pouring billions of dollars into their plans to make more, it just kind of took my breath away. Can you talk a little bit about why? And I think on the surface, there might be an obvious why because of profit, perhaps. But I mean, plastic production carries its own enormous environmental and health costs. We've been talking about that for decades now. You write about studies that show the health implications. You know,

health implications of this and as well as environmental. So why haven't these companies pivoted to clean renewables instead of doubling down on plastic? I think there's kind of two layers to that. So one is that is what they have always done. If you look back at the history of the plastic and petrochemical industry, which really in its modern form goes back to essentially World War II and the post-war years, the line. just goes, you know, relentlessly up. Back in 1950, the plastic industry globally produced about two million metric tons annually of plastic. Today, we're over 500 million tons annually. So that tells you sort of the trajectory that we've been on, right? Like more plastic equals more

money. It's not an expensive commodity, so it needs to be a volume commodity if they're going to profit from it. In the past 20 years, the output has doubled. Looking forward, the plan is to double and eventually triple in the years to come. So that's the first sort of level of the answer. But the second level is almost even more disturbing, which is that, you know, the fossil fuel industry, which is essentially who makes plastic, they have these subsidiaries oftentimes that are petrochemical focused. This industry can see that their business model is under threat. And that is not only from sort of climate action and climate policy, you know, laws that might push people onto clean energy and away from fossil fuels. But now they're actually being

really economically undercut. Only in the past few years have solar and wind power actually become cheaper than oil and gas and, you know, even coal, which used to be the sort of dirty but cheap standby for energy. Electric vehicles and batteries, we have alternatives now, and they're cheaper. And on top of that, we're all getting a sort of object lesson right now every day in the headlines. If you look at what's happening in the Persian Gulf, the conflict with Iran, the straight of wharf moves. It's, you know, very dangerous to be as dependent on fossil fuels as we are. So this is an industry that's under threat. Plastic is another revenue stream when you drill for oil and gas. It's another source of money. Okay, so you interviewed a range of people for this

book. You interviewed scientists and lawyers, lawmakers. You had some industry insiders who also talk to you. What happened when you tried to talk to the companies themselves? And I should state, there are a handful of companies that you found making the majority of the plastic production that we use and consume in the world. Yeah, so ExxonMobil is said to be the biggest producer of single-use plastics. It's a little complicated because there's all these sort of ingredients that you combine in a multitude of steps. There's, you know, other huge oil companies. like Saudi Aramco, the Saudi largely government-owned oil company, Sinopac in China, shell oil has a subsidiary called Shell Chemicals.

And then there are also freestanding companies that are chemical companies like a Dow, a DuPont, Ineos is a big one. But they're often very deeply interconnected with fossil fuel companies because they get their, that's where they get their raw materials and their ingredients. So most of them didn't want to talk to me. Some of them did. But the biggest glimpse I got was when I went to an industry conference in Dubai a couple of years ago, the Gulf Petrochemical Association invited me to come to their conference. And that was not only sort of regional oil and chemical companies, but also some of the big multinationals. And when you were there, that was really an interesting section in your book, they were all speaking. I think what you termed it green language, words like sustainability and innovation, but you write at one point the mask slipped.

What were they actually saying when they dropped sort of this corporate speak? Right. So there was a panel, and these were some chemical executives, talking about the global plastics pollution treaty negotiations that have been going on for the past few years now, where they have really been, you know, coming out in. force with a very heavy presence of lobbyists. And one of these executives from one of the Gulf based companies started talking about how, you know, people get very emotional when they talk about plastics. And some of the activists at the treaty negotiations are very negative and they're twisting, you know, recycling into a negative. And he basically called out to the audience and said, you know, we need your help. This is an audience of industry representatives. We need your help. We need legal assistance. We need policy research papers. We need scientific

research papers to make our case at these negotiations. And the two big areas of concern that I think were, you know, getting his back up a little bit, were that there's been a push at these negotiations to try to create some kind of a limit on plastic production. The industry has really pushed back card that that hits it at the heart of where its profits come from. And they have always preferred to frame plastic as sort of a waste management problem, like as long as it, you know, ends up in the trash or a landfill rather than the ocean, you know, then it's okay. And the other area where he, you know, clearly felt very threatened is around the question of chemicals in plastic that may be harming our health. That's another big area.

concerned for the industry. So the waste management framing is something that I think we all have believed for a long time. We actually in our daily lives take steps to recycle because we believe that will be that will help in the plastic issue. These companies, they didn't talk to you directly about many of the things that you assert in this book, but they have said plenty in other places. And one of their central arguments, in addition to what you're saying here, is that they make more plastic because we want more plastic. Basically, global demand drives production. Is it true that we also play a part in this, that we're driving up the demand for it? I mean, it's so interesting, right?

And that is what they say, you know, when you look at the production numbers that the companies are asked about them, there's a lot of talk about, you know, consumers are demanding this, whether it's sort of, you know, consumers in wealthy countries are kind of demanding convenience. We want the takeout containers and all of that. Or a lot of times now they talk about sort of global South countries that demand is growing there as the middle classes are rising in countries like India and Indonesia and, you know, buying more appliances and things like that. I mean, that's not wrong. There is some truth in it. But one thing that I thought was so interesting when I started to understand. how some of these markets work, is that plastic has this really unique property, I think,

which is that it has the ability to reverse the normal relationship between supply and demand. So, you know, if you go to the grocery store and you are buying, you know, some fruit, you want to buy some apples, and they're wrapped in plastic, you didn't demand plastic. You economically demanded apples, right? So it just goes to the point that a lot of times we don't actually have a choice. And plastic is so cheap. It becomes economical for businesses to use it. And it makes sense for a restaurant to give you a plastic fork when you're sitting down and eating in because they're making a calculation versus what it might cost them to pay someone to clear the table and have a dishwasher in the back room.

maybe they don't have space for it in the kitchen. So the low price of plastic is sort of pushing it into the world. And we as individuals don't always have a choice about that. And the reason it is so cheap in large part is because it doesn't incorporate the true costs of dealing with it after the fact. So we as actually taxpayers are shouldering the burden of managing all that plastic waste. And that is why we, can't escape it in our lives. And we don't really necessarily have a choice about that. I want to talk a little bit with you about the health ramifications. We understand that plastic is all around us, but can you give us a brief sense of just the sheer amount of exposure we

have to plastic and plastic particles in our day-to-day lives? Sure. I mean, for one thing, we're breathing it in. I mean, there was actually one. study that a scientist in, I believe, Colorado did that found that five billion bottles worth of microplastics are falling on the United States every year in just the wind and the rain. So it's sort of all around us. We're breathing it in. We're eating it and drinking it.

You know, it's not just that the water bottle that's holding your water or the takeout container that might have held your food. is shedding chemicals and microplastics. But even if you sort of go back a step, right, like in the dairy facility, the milk is being piped through plastic tubing to get even to the bottles. Probably the cow has microplastics in their milk. You know, microplastics are in the soil, so they enter, you know, fruits and vegetables and things that are grown. When you think about the pervasiveness of plastic in our lives and in our world, it's just sort of being reflected on a microscopic level. You can't get away from this stuff. One note that you write about that

tripped me out was the study that analyzed 52 human brain samples and every single one contained microplastics. Yeah. So the research on the chemicals in plastic and how they affect us goes back quite a few decades now. But what's much newer is studies looking at these tiny plastic particles called microplastics. And they have been found absolutely everywhere out in the world and inside our bodies. One of the most disturbing studies was done by a team at the University of New Mexico. And not only did they find microplastic particles present in human brains, people that had died that they studied. But they found that the levels of microplastics were higher in the brains of people who had

dementia when they passed away than people who did not. And they did this study in 2024. And they found that the people who had died that year had levels of microplastics in their brains that were something like 50% higher than people who had died just eight years earlier and been studied. And I just want to get clarity, though. Is this a correlation causation situation here? Yeah, so the science is in its very early stages around microplastics.

And all that scientists can really say now is that there is a correlation. One thing that's very tricky about studying the impact of microplastics and the chemicals in plastic as well is that there is no control group because all of us are exposed to this stuff. all the time. So there is a lot of work still to be done. But, you know, some of the early indications are very worrying. We don't know about causation yet, but that is a pretty scary place to start. You know, in the 2000s, we all learned, or most of us learned for the first time about BPAs. And that was a big deal. We started to learn about some of the harms of that. But one of the most disturbing things you write about BPA is that it doesn't seem to have a threshold below, which it doesn't cause any effects.

Yes. One expert told you, I don't think there's really a safe level of this. If that's true, what does that mean? Well, I think one thing it means is that we really need our governments to do a better job of testing and keeping some of these chemicals out of the products that we use every day. and the industry needs to start looking at making some safer alternatives. One thing that really shocked me in reading this is that I learned that in the United States, you don't actually have to prove that a chemical is safe before you can put it on the market.

If you are a pharmaceutical maker or a pesticide maker, you know, you have to go through a whole safety process, right? There's a lot of problems with this now that we're all realizing around pesticides. Some of them are kind of dangerous that are getting onto the market. But there is a process there with chemicals used in plastic, in packaging, in, you know, toys. This is all governed by an incredibly flawed 1976 law called the toxic substances control act. And I think the most shocking thing about it is that it took an approach of innocent until proven guilty, meaning if you were a company and you want to start using a chemical in new packaging and product to sell on the market, you do not have to demonstrate that it's safe. The government, the EPA, Environmental Protection Agency, has to demonstrate that it's dangerous.

I have to stop you right here to say, I believe most Americans believe if it is available to us that it has already gone through the rigor of being tested and, safe? You know, I wish there was a poll on this because I have thought that so many times, too. I would absolutely bet money that if you asked most Americans, does a chemical have to be proven safe before it can be put on the market in a plastic bottle or a container that baby food is going to go in or anything else, that people would absolutely think that that is the case. But it is not. It goes back to 1976, you know, that was the era of environmental lawmaking. The Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act were passed right around the same time. Those are really, really strong laws with like lots and lots of accountability built into them. The Toxic Substances Control Act was understood from the very beginning to just have been designed to fail. Not only does it have this innocent until proven guilty approach, but, 60,000 chemicals were grandfathered in at the very beginning just because they were already on the market that they could continue to be sold. And over 40 years, only I think it's five chemicals were restricted on a national basis in any way.

There's tens of thousands of them out there. So, you know, that tells you how weak and ineffective this law is. It was tightened up a little bit in 2016, but, you know, we have not made a lot of progress since then. Let's take a short break. Our guest today is journalist and author Beth Gardner. We'll be right back after a short break. I'm Tanya Mosley, and this is fresh air. I want to ask you about the Gulf Coast of Texas and Louisiana, which you write quite extensively about in the book. Those areas are basically the heart of American plastic and petrochemical production. You actually went to a neighborhood called Manchester. It's in the Houston area right in the middle of what you're talking about.

What does that place in particular tell us about the cost of? of this industry. Yeah, Manchester is a predominantly Latino, very working-class neighborhood in Houston. I sat in a little park there called Hartman Park, which has like, you know, a baseball diamond and a couple of tennis courts and a little playground. And you look around you and you just see these enormous industrial facilities, refineries and petrochemical plants all around. There was an activist who took me for a drive.

out of Manchester through what's called the Houston Ship Channel. It's about 50 miles long, and it is lined with oil refineries and petrochemical plants. Petrochemical plants, I learned to recognize them. It's like they have this almost like spaghetti tangle of pipes that surround them and kind of rise up from them. So there's sort of ongoing constant emissions. And then there are, they call them events, fires. and explosions. There was a big oil refinery explosion in

Port Arthur, Texas, very recently. Very often, for people who live nearby, this will result in shelter-in-place orders. So you have to kind of stay in your house and turn off the AC and put a towel under the door, tape up the windows, and

try to keep whatever chemicals are out there from coming in. And this is a daily reality of life for people who live in that area. And I think one of the things that makes this pretty astounding is there's no zoning between industrial and residential. It's really the only major city where that is true. And there's this phrase that you write about that activists use, sacrifice zone. What does that mean? And how does Manchester fit into that

definition? Yeah, I heard that, I heard that phrase in particular from a guy named Robert Taylor, who I met in Louisiana in a stretch along the Mississippi River. It is another major hub of petrochemical production. He lives near a plant that makes neoprene artificial rubber. And one of the chemicals that's emitted when you do that is called chloroprene. It's very dangerous. A lot of times these plants get talked about in relation to jobs, right? We need this plant because you know, we need the tax revenue, we need the employment. And Robert Taylor said to me, my neighborhood is like a sacrifice zone. We are being sacrificed for the sake of somebody else to have 200 jobs. The neighborhood, he told me the sort of mile or so radius around this

particular plant that he lives near is more than 90% black. And he said, you know, none of us are very few of us getting jobs in the plant. We're paying with our lives for, you know, 200 people who live somewhere else. They drive home at night to have a job in this plant. There have been lots of efforts over the years to to properly zone this area. What type of resistance have activists come up against? Well, it's interesting in this area of Louisiana on the lower Mississippi River, the activists refer to it. as cancer alley, the industry and a lot of the local politicians who have welcomed the industry really dispute that characterization and they say that the numbers are unfair. The science is not clear. But I think it is well known that some of these chemicals that people are breathing are very well established to be carcinogenic. Pretty typically, it ends up being an economic argument.

And I think that, you know, you really have to take a step back and understand how politically powerful this industry is in some of those states. And I heard tremendous amounts of criticism from the activists of the Texas and Louisiana state regulators that they say are, you know, not doing their job. They're not protecting us. I spoke to a guy named Christian Menafee, who at the time was the attorney for Harris County, where, Houston is located. And he said to me, you know, in most areas of life, you run a stop sign and you get a ticket, right? But there's no stop signs and there's no tickets for this industry. Of course, the industry and the agencies very much dispute that. But, you know, a lot of people on the ground do see it that way. Is it a coincidence that the communities that bear the greatest burden of

this industry are almost universally communities of color and low-income communities? Yeah, no, I don't think it is a coincidence. You won't be surprised to hear that. I mean, those tend to be communities that are less politically powerful. They are often poorer. And it's easier to cite a facility when you're building a new petrochemical plant or an oil refinery or any really, you know, highly polluting industrial facility, there's just less political resistance if you want to put it in a predominantly black or Latino poor neighborhood versus, you know, trying to put it in a well-off white suburb. You can imagine the hollabaloo that would create. Let's take a short break. If you're just joining us, my guest is Beth

Gardner, journalist and author of the new book, Plastic Inc, the secret history and shocking future of Big Oil's biggest bet. We'll be right back after a break. This is fresh air. I want to talk a little bit about the global picture for a moment because you write about that as well in this book. A fascinating detail is what actually happened when China stopped accepting the world's plastic waste

back in 2018. That was a big media splash, a big story back then. You spoke with a woman who climbs a mountain of plastic every day. And she's noted that it's plastic with American and European and Korean labels on it. And she earns about $2 to $4 for seven hours of work. And what did she say to you? Yeah, I actually climbed that mountain myself. And it's in the western part of the Indonesian island of Java, just outside Jakarta.

China said in 2018, we've had enough of this. We don't want the trash from other. countries anymore. And it caused a huge crisis in waste management. So things started piling up and developed countries started to look for other places to send it. And one of the first destinations was Southeast Asia. So I actually went to Indonesia to try to get a look at what's happened there. I climbed up that mountain with a group of people who took me there. You know, it was 20, 30, 40 feet high, maybe. many, many football fields wide. And when I climbed up it, you know, I walked around and I saw brands that I recognized. I saw one of those people who loves Trader Joe's. And I started,

they're no worse than any other company. But I started seeing Trader Joe's packaging, just all kinds of old sandals and bottles and bags and plastics. And I met a, met a woman and her husband who climbed up there every day. She sold bananas. Nana's in the morning. And then when she finished that, she went up this mountain. And she said the plastic would be like hot to the touch. It was hot under her feet because it was just baking out there in the sun. All kinds of Western brands that, you know, I recognized and you would too. That with everything that you're saying at every turn, somehow the message is it's our responsibility to fix it. It's our individual and collective responsibility to fix it. it through our behaviors. You know, and what I hear so much from people, like friends or acquaintances that I talk to who are not, you know, connected anyway with like environmental issues is a sense of guilt.

Like people tell me they feel guilty when they, you know, bought another plastic water bottle because I was thirsty when I was out for a walk or whatever. I hear so much of that. And in a way that was really what drove me to go so deep in this book because that serves the industry, right? And it really distracts us from a much bigger picture. One of the things that was so powerful for me was when I

learned about this industry work in the 1970s with this organization called Keep America Beautiful. You know, it sounds so benevolent. And Anadine, it was an anti-littering campaign. Keep America Beautiful started in the 1950s after

Vermont banned throwaway cans for beer. It didn't last, but that law prompted the formation, Coke and Pepsi, Philip Morris, Tobacco, the American Can Company, were some of the very early members and supporters of this organization. No one really thought of Keep America Beautiful as being an industry organization. But in fact, it was they ran these littering campaigns. One of the advertising taglines said, Keeping America Beautiful is your job. So, I mean, this was just, there's so many layers to that, right? First of all, in this,

this era when disposable packaging was becoming more and more widespread. These companies were pushing it into the market. But nonetheless, the industry was telling us that this is a matter of personal responsibility. It's up to us as individuals. And what they were doing there was not only shifting the framing of the plastic problem from a sort of corporate accountability to a personal responsibility, which is always such a resonant message for Americans, but they were actually also reframing what the problem was. The problem in this telling of like stop littering was not that there's too much plastic being produced. The problem is just that it's ending up in the wrong place.

And if we stop littering, if these, you know, bad litter bugs, they coined that term, stop throwing, you know, trash out there at car windows, and they put it in the trash, can, then everything will be fine and we won't have a problem. So they've sort of not only shifted the responsibility from them onto us, but they've even changed the definition of really what the issue is to begin with. These companies have made very public commitments to cleaning up public waste. All of them have a green arm. We know them. We see them sometimes in commercials. We see literature about them. There's this alliance called the Alliance to End Plastic Waste. It promises over a billion dollars to these efforts. Do these efforts offset any of the harm that you're talking about?

I think a lot of these efforts are part of the industry's push to reframe our understanding of what the problem is. From their perspective, it is a waste management problem. So if there's plastic on the beach or there's plastic in the ocean, that is bad, they would say. But the answer to that is cleaning up the beach and then putting the trash in the right place, right? It's never a problem of too much plastic being produced. So while these companies, fossil fuel and petrochemical companies are sponsoring beach cleanups or they're throwing a few dollars at a city in a Southeast Asian country that's struggling with trash to help them clean up or make a better waste management system.

At the same time, they are every year, year after year after year, increasing the amount of plastic that they are producing. Beth, I was trying to imagine how hard it would actually be to live a plastic-free life. If we were to say, okay, we don't want to use any plastic in our daily life, and I'm going to make an individual choice to do that. I mean, is that even possible? I mean, no, is the short answer. Of course you can't on an individual level. But I also kind of think it's the wrong question because one of the ways that the industry has liked to talk about this is when they are criticized about, you know, the excessive amount of plastic and people's concerns about that. One thing that they will often say in response is like, well, but there are all these like incredibly valuable uses, right? Like plastic is. they always talk about the green ones. So plastic is used in solar panels and wind turbines. And it's

used to make cars lighter weight or even planes are partly made of different plastic composites. It's their lighter weight. So it's more fuel efficient. Like, yeah, those things are all true. Or there was a speech I watched by a one petrochemical executive who said like, okay, fine, well, if you want to go back and live in a cave, then you can. But they're framing it as this all or nothing, right? Like, okay, I still want to have single-use plastic something or other if I am in the hospital and, you know, sanitary, medical, right? There's some pretty legitimate uses. But that doesn't also mean that there's not a tremendous amount of just totally unnecessary and ridiculous uses of plastic. So I think it's sort of important to separate those and say we don't actually have to use zero plastic, but we could pretty easily use a lot less. I think. you've seen that in places where, you know, disposable plastic bags have a fee on them of, you know, 5, 10, 15 cents. The bag usage goes down by like 90% or something. So we could live with a lot less. And I don't think we'd miss a lot of it. Beth Gardner, thank you so much for your journalism in this book. Tanya, it's been such a pleasure talking to you. Beth Gardner's new book is Plastic Inc. The Secret History and Shocking Future of Big Oil's Biggest Bet.

In response to Gartner's book, Ross Eisenberg, President of America's Plastic Makers, a division of the American Chemistry Council, gave us this statement. He says, quote, as the world's population grows and more people move into the middle class, the need for plastics will continue to increase. He goes on to argue that plastic is essential to modern life, from food safety and clean water to wind turbines and solar panels. He says they support expanding recycling infrastructure and better product design, but their core message, as Eisenberg puts it, is that we need smart policies that preserve the benefits plastics provide while pursuing practical, scalable solutions that reduce waste. Coming up, rock critic Ken Tucker reviews Cloud 9, the latest album from singer-songwriter Megan Maroney. This is Fresh Air.

Megan Maroney just might be the biggest star in country music right now. Her latest album, Cloud 9, debuted at the top of both the Billboard Hot Country and Hot 100 charts, solidifying her crossover appeal. Maroni, who will begin her first stadium tour this summer, is attracting a younger audience than the average country star. Cloud 9 features guests like Casey Musgraves and Ed Shearin on duets that rock critic Ken Tucker says, demonstrate Moroni's command of country heartache. I ain't heard from you in three long days.

You won't hear from me for five. Oh, you gave your number to an L.A. blonde. Well, I gave you a quarterback's mine. And you don't like my short black dress. Well, it's going out tonight. And if it hits the floor, it won't be yours this time. Is it bitter going out? Hey, don't blame me.

Any country songwriter who can rhyme the phrase, messing with your head again with Taste of Your Own Medicine, is OK by me. Megan Maroni spins out tales of romantic revenge with a smooth fluency that contrasts with the raspy drawl she uses to sing them. Her album Cloud 9 arrives as a new kind of music from Big Pink, pink dress and cotton candy clouds on the cover,

pink vinyl on the inside. She toys with Barbie World Playfulness only to put the hammer down on guys who disrespect her. That's Maroni having the last laugh at a guy who treated her miserably and has now come crawling back, showcasing another killer chorus line. What doesn't kill you? Calls you six months later. Moroni's pop crossover and sizable young female audience

is all the more impressive when you hear the way she leans into hard country ballads featuring pedal steel guitar and mandolin. And consider her duet with Ed Sheeran. No one would peg Sheeran for a country crooner, yet they trade verses on I Only Miss You, like a latter day George and Tammy. I thought today would be the day that I'd finally finish sober.

Without sadness in my chest, wake up with no hangover. Thought tonight would be the night. I'd get a full eight hours to sleep. I'd quit line. I'd miss you when I'm breathing. Face is far from blue when it's rain. This downpour outside ain't nothing new.

I'm barely getting when I'm drinking. And baby, I've been drinking because I miss you all the time. Some have criticized the quality of Maroni's voice for its husky limited range. But I like those limitations. In the context of country music, of someone who's a songwriter first and a vocalist second, it comes across as authenticity. This can feel manufactured, and I'm mindful of the fact that she told the Los Angeles Times she was a marketing major in college and added,

If this doesn't work out, I'd be just as happy working for a label on the marketing team. Well, good for her. It also suggests a hard-headed realism that can result in the tart sentiments she and Casey Musk Graves offer in bells and whistles, a song in praise of difficult women. She laughs at your jokes. She don't tell you know you walk in half past three. She's just glad you got home. She don't put on no makeup and don't bleed your hair and she wouldn't be caught dead.

She don't get mad, she don't get mean, she lets you beer, she's sweet and she's simple, she's like me without the bells and the whistles. She's steady, she's sure, she don't ask many questions, she thinks less is more, she don't come with the spotlight, she'll wait around. I should probably mention that Moroni has a colleague galloping to prominence right behind her. Ella Langley, whose hit single, Chuse in Texas and forthcoming album Dandelion, promise even more examples of this fresh synthesis of hardcore country and pop. It'd be great if Megan Maroney was at the forefront of a whole new chapter in the genre.

Ken Tucker reviewed Megan Maroney's latest album, Cloud 9. Me is Pepsi fine? I wanted a Coke but said it's more than a rush hour traffic. No, it can't talk in some more bad news. And the neighbors upstairs always party till two, but who cares? Tomorrow on Fresh Air, award-winning actor John Lithgow, still going strong at age 80. He stars with Jeff Bridges in the Hulu series The Old Man. He'll play Dumbledore in a new movie.

new HBO Harry Potter series, and he's starring on Broadway in The Play Giant about a troubling side of children's author, Roald Dahl. I hope you can join us. To keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews, follow us on Instagram at NPR Fresh Air. You can also watch some of our Fresh Air interviews on YouTube. Fresh Air's executive producer is Sam Brigger. Our senior producer, today is Teresa Madden. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Mayors, Anne-Marie Boldenado, Lauren Crenzel, Monique Nazareth, Thea Challoner, Susan Yacundi, Anna Bauman, and Nico Gonzalez Whistler. Our digital

media producer is Molly C.B. Nesper. Roberta Shorak directs the show. With Terry Gross, I'm Tanya Mosley.