Songfacts®:

• William Michael Morgan recalls here meeting the girl who stole his heart and has changed his entire world.
• The song was co-written by Sam Hunt with Shane McAnally and Trevor Rosen. Hunt originally recorded the tune for his 2013 mixtape Between The Pines. His version is acoustic with his typical singing/talking style. Morgan's interpretation, on the other hand, is traditional country. Morgan said the different renditions of the song are proof there's room for everybody in country music.
  
  "When we heard it, it was a whole total different production on it," he recalled to ABC Radio. "I think it was his mixtape demo. But man, we just loved that song, and we love everything that Sam is doing, and you've got the Sam Hunts, the Luke Bryans, the Jason Aldeans in this lane, going this fast, and you've got, you know, the Easton Corbins and the Chris Youngs and [me] over here doing this thing, you know. And it's all one big highway, we're all going to the same place. We're all trying to get the same message across, we're just doing it different."
• The song was released with a radio add date of August 24, 2015 by Warner Bros. Nashville. Fifty-eight weeks later, it crawled to the #1 spot on the Country Radio chart. It was such a gradual climb that it actually set a record for the longest road to the summit.
• The lyrics of Sam Hunt's version immediately caught Morgan's attention. He recalled to Billboard magazine: "I saw the girl crossing the street, biting her lip, fixing her dress. Sam and Shane McAnally and Trevor Rosen have such a great way of painting those pictures when they write those songs. That's something I wanted to do."
• Shane McAnally recalled to The Boot the songwriting session with Sam Hunt and Trevor Rosen that produced this song.
  
  "It was just kind of a typical writing day, where we all just get together. At that time, we wrote with Sam a lot, and not necessarily, at that point, for any specific project, or if he was going to be an artist. We didn't know; we were just writing. We were writing at that time a lot; Trevor wasn't as busy as he is now, nor was Sam.
  
  It was just one of those days where, I don't really remember how it all came together. I would be surprised if any of us came in and said, 'Let's write a song, "I Met a Girl;"' that doesn't sound like something we would start with. But the chorus and the flow and the way that's laid out feels very much like something we would start with, and then probably would have written something.
  
  When you have that many colors and that many pieces, it's kind of nice to just land on something simple like 'I Met a Girl.' It really gives you room to color up the verses with 'tilt-a-whirl' and 'blue-jean pearls' and things like that."
• The images that Morgan sings of here are real things that happened to the songwriting trio, McAnally said: "The three of us in the room were trying to go back to moments - My little girl thinks that 'I Met a Girl' is about her. It was actually written before she was born, but I do love that it can live in that world, because now I kind of can't remember that it's not about her."