Songfacts®:

• This song was written by Martin Page, who co-wrote the Starship song "We Built This City" and Heart's hit "These Dreams." He also had a solo hit in 1994 with "In the House of Stone and Light."
  
  "Morena" is an affectionate Spanish term for a dark-haired girl. Page came across the word when he was reading a poem by Pablo Neruda, who is Chilean. The book he was reading the poems from had the original Spanish text on one page and their English translations on the other. When he saw "Morena," he thought it made a beautiful sound and wrote a story around it. Said Page: "It's such a romantic song, and I love brunette ladies, so I thought, 'This is going to be a Pablo Neruda song.' The whole song is influenced by reading all of his love poetry and just feeling how Neruda gets so under the skin with his love songs. It's not corny; it's rusty and deep and dark and bloody. And as soon as I knew that 'Mi Morena' meant 'My dark one,' I wrote it as an ode to a brunette and somebody watching somebody from afar dance." (Here's our full Martin Page interview.)
• Martin Page, who wrote this song, also played all the instruments on the track except for the nylon guitar, which was performed by Brian Fairweather, who was in a band with Page in the '80s called Q-Feel. The track was mixed by Mike Shipley, who had worked with Page and Fairweather since their Q-Feel days.
• This became a live favorite for Groban. He performed it at two concerts in September 2004 at the Greek Theater in Los Angeles, which were compiled into a CD/DVD set called Josh Groban: Live at the Greek.
• Martin Page released his own version of this song in 2008 on his second album, In the Temple of the Muse.