Songfacts®:

• This is the title track of The Band Perry's second studio album. To begin the recording process, the trio took a road trip from Tennessee out to Malibu, California. They wrote a lot of the music along the way, including this song in Santa Fe, New.Mexico.
• The band explained during an album preview event that the song title pays tribute to those who set foot "into the unknown."
• The album title was inspired by The Band Perry's own road trip. "We see it as a journey," Kimberly Perry told Billboard magazine. "It's us going from point A to point B and every step along the way. That journey led us to a new horizon and a new place."
• The tune's message is about the exhilaration of exploring the unknown. "The song really asks more questions than it has answers," Kimberly explained to The Boot. "Sometimes when you're barreling towards your future, you have no idea what it's gonna look like or how you're gonna get there, and it can be a scary thing.
  "For us, 'Pioneer' is about the journey from our first album to our second," she added, "everything that we've been thinking about and living out for the past two years. It's about putting one foot in front of the other and about the journey. We did take a literal journey from east Tennessee all the way to the southwest and Malibu to do a long songwriting trip. 'Pioneer' was written on a hilltop in Santa Fe with the skyline in the background, and it was just a beautiful, inspiring moment."