Songfacts®:

• Many different iterations of this lullaby-like tune have shown up in Frances Luke Accord's catalog throughout the years, but the contemporary-folk duo (Nicholas Gunty and Brian Powers) never felt like they got it quite right until Safe In Sound, their second full-length album.
  
  "I'm that classic painter that doesn't know when the final brushstroke is gonna happen, which is why I need Brian," Gunty admitted in a 2023 Songfacts Podcast interview.
• Gunty also told Songfacts how the song, which was written in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria in 2017, was derived from a number of ancient influences:
  
  "Originally 'Maria' started as a bunch of things just slamming together in my mind. My partner is a scholar of ancient Judaism, so there's a lot of talk about ancient scripture in our house, not necessarily from a confessional perspective, but from an academic point of view. I love that partly because - and this is something that Brian and I both believe - that the best spiritual writing is poetic and is poetry in essence.
  
  So I was thinking about a lot of different things that were coming from all sorts of angles - from ancient Buddhism to ancient Judaism to ancient Christianity. I was also thinking of medieval Eastern European mythology, and I was writing a bunch of things and throwing them in and playing around with words. And all of a sudden the word 'Maria' came out of all of that, and it was right after Hurricane Maria had devastated Puerto Rico. I'm not even sure I could tell you exactly how we got to a song. It probably had a lot more to do with Brian's editing hand than my throwing spaghetti at the wall."
• Gunty and Powers are both natives of South Bend, Indiana, who started making music together at the University of Notre Dame. In their senior year, they record the not-for-profit project Kandote, an intercultural collaboration with the Barefoot Truth Children's Choir in Uganda. After college, they moved to Chicago in 2013 to soak up the atmosphere and hone their sound. Three years later, they issued their official debut album, Fluke.
• They adopted the name Frances Luke Accord from a combination of random and personal details: Powers lived on Francis St. (they changed the spelling to Frances to avoid competition with Pope Francis on Google searches); Gunty's middle name is Luke; and Accord is just a cool word to tie it all together.