Songfacts®:

• "Background Music" finds Maren Morris reflecting on how she's spending her time on this planet. The singer ponders on mortality and the impact she and her then-husband, Ryan Hurd, will leave on others when they're gone.
  
  Maybe all we'll ever be to them in a hundred years
  Is three minutes in a car, in a bar, that says we were here
  
  People will remember Morris and Hurd for their songs, but she hopes their legacy will be much more.
• During the chorus, Morris promises to love her husband until their time on earth draws to a close.
  
  We got time but we're only human
  We call it forever but we know that there's an end to it
  You and I can dance our way through it
  And I'll love you till all that we are is background music
  
  Morris offered this explanation of the hazy ballad: "I wrote this about the beauty of the temporary, which is inevitably all things. The romanticism of eternity sounds nice, but I like to think I savor things better when I know I'm not entitled to it in perpetuity. It's a love song that addresses mortality but it's also promising someone that even when we aren't cool anymore, I want to grow old with them and laugh about the times we thought we were."
  
  Morris and Hurd didn't make it to forever - they divorced in 2024.
• Morris released "Background Music" as the second single from Humble Quest on February 11, 2022.
• Maren Morris wrote the song with Laura Veltz and Jimmy Robbins. The same trio also penned her hit singles "I Could Use a Love Song" and "The Bones."
• Greg Kurstin produced the track. He also helmed "Girl," the lead single and title track of Morris' second album, and "Circles Around This Town," the lead single from Humble Quest.
• Kurstin played all the instruments on the track: electric guitar, bass, acoustic guitar, drums, and keys.
• Maren Morris wrote this love ballad from the belief that songwriters only get a decade of chart success before fading into obscurity. However, the music she makes with Hurd will probably outlast them both. "We wrote it from a standpoint of being like, 'This is not going to be gold forever. It's going to fade at some point, and that's OK,'" Morris told Bustle. "After we're gone, maybe these songs will still be played in bars and cars, and that's more romantic to me than eternity."
• The song began as an idea to write about being so in love, everything else is just background music. Once Morris brought the title to the writing room, it took on a more timeless meaning. "It just grew into something much more mature and evergreen," she told Audacy. "It's kind of a song about mortality... and knowing that some day, I think it would be amazing if people still heard my songs after I was gone and songs that I've written with someone that I loved."
• Laura Veltz' favorite lyric in the song is, "Not everybody gets to leave a souvenir." For Veltz, that is such a true statement.
  
  "It makes being a songwriter, or any kind of creator... you just feel so lucky that you get to live a little longer, so to speak, than the average person, through such a gift," she told Billboard. "I've written so many songs with Maren, but I think that was the first time that we collectively made ourselves cry. All three of us were like, 'Wow.'"