Songfacts®:

• For Sara Evans, who grew up on a farm in Missouri, "Born To Fly" is her version of "Over The Rainbow." Like Dorothy in The Wizard Of Oz, Evans dreams of spreading her wings and flying to greener pastures. But, of course, Evans ends up in Music City instead of Emerald City.
  
  "It's kind of an anthem," Evans told Wide Open Country in 2020. "How do you stay in a small town in Missouri in rural America when you know that you're born to do big things? I just had to make that tough choice to leave my family and my home, my friends and everything that I'd ever known and move to Nashville. But I knew that I was born to fly."
• Evans wrote the song with Nashville songwriters Marcus Hummon ("Cowboy Take Me Away") and Darrell Scott ("Long Time Gone"), who were inspired by her life story.
  
  "It was the story of my life because I'd never met these writers before," she explained. "It's crazy because I've written so many songs with them since then. But Marcus just said, 'Tell me about you.' So I started talking about growing up on a farm in Missouri and being a total farm kid and having to work really hard… He just started strumming and kind of singing jokingly 'I've been telling my dreams to the scarecrow.' And we're like, 'Oh, that's so awesome!' Because it's such a vivid picture of me standing out in the cornfield talking to the scarecrow and we just went from there."
• With Born To Fly, her third studio album, Evans wanted to shift from neotraditional country to the commercial friendly country-pop style that helped acts like Faith Hill, Martina McBride, and Shania Twain go mainstream. But she was most impressed with the bluegrassy sound of the Dixie Chicks and wanted to develop her own version of their style with crossover appeal.
  
  To achieve her goal, she enlisted their producer Paul Worley and rock session musician Matt Chamberlain, who previously backed Pearl Jam, Tori Amos, Fiona Apple, and The Wallflowers, to work on the album. As a result, it became her breakout release, selling 2 million copies in the US. Its title track also went to #1 on the Country chart and #34 on the Billboard Hot 100.
• The music video, directed by Peter Zavadil, continues the Wizard Of Oz theme, with Evans playing Dorothy biding her time on the farm with her little dog until a tornado sweeps her away. The clip won the CMA Award for Video of the Year in 2001. Evans continued working with Zavadil on nearly all of her videos, including her 2024 single "Pride."
• Evans titled her 2020 memoir after this song.
• Evans included a bluegrass version on her 2011 album, Stronger.