You're listening to Song Exploder,
where musicians take apart their songs and piece by piece tell the story of how they were made.
I'm Rishikesh Hirway.
Maren Morris is a Grammy-winning, multi-platinum artist.
She's also won multiple country music awards,
including CMAs for Female Vocalist of the Year and Single of the Year.
But her feelings about the country music industry are kind of complicated,
as she discusses in this episode.
She breaks down her song Humble Quest, which is the title track from her third album.
It was produced by Greg Kirsten, who's won the Producer of the Year Grammy more than once.
The album came out in March and hit number two on the Billboard country chart.
But before Humble Quest was a title, Maren had to figure out what the words meant to her.
That's where the song began.
My name is Maren Morris.
I was driving around Nashville one day, and when I'm driving,
especially by myself, it's where I get a lot of song ideas,
and Humble Quest was one of them that day, and I didn't know what the hell it meant.
I just thought, wow, that's a weird phrase,
weird two words sandwiched together, but I thought it was interesting.
And I was writing that next day or two with my friends, Jimmy Robbins and Laura Veltz.