Songfacts®:

• "Better Than We Found It" is a protest song where Maren Morris implores us to action, asking us to take responsibility and bring about positive change in the world.
  
  When lines of tomorrow are drawn
  Can I live with the side that I chose to be on?
  Will we sit on our hands, do nothin' about it?
  Or will we leave this world better than we found it?
  
  Morris is questioning whether history will look back kindly on the choices we are making.
• Maren Morris gave birth to her first child, Hayes Andrew Hurd, on March 23, 2020. She reflects on her new motherhood throughout the song, including the beginning of the chorus.
  
  When time turns this moment to dust
  I just hope my son's proud of the woman I was
  
  Morris co-wrote the song over the summer of 2020 with Jessie Jo Dillon, Jimmy Robbins and Laura Veltz; it's produced by Greg Kurstin. They penned "Better Than We Found It" partly in response to the Black Lives Matter movement. "I wanted to write something to address exactly how I feel right now, and this came together pretty quickly," said Morris in a statement. "It's a protest song - it's the most American thing to protest and protest songs have been so embedded in American culture: Bob Dylan, Nina Simone."
• The Gabrielle Woodland-directed video shows Morris performing the song in a church. Between the shots of her performance are clips featuring various Nashvillians who are working for change: Gustavo Flores, a young immigrant who has been told he has to leave and return to his native Mexico by early 2021; young activists Jade Fuller and Emma Rose Smith, who organize Black Lives Matter protests; and the uncle and mother of Daniel Hambrick, a Black man who was killed by Nashville police.
  
  The visual ends with Morris sitting on a picnic blanket with her baby son. She reads aloud a letter she wrote to him about her desire to help create a better world, saying, "I have to do better. I will do better for you."
• Maren Morris is donating a portion of the proceeds from the track to Black Women's Health Imperative, a nonprofit organized by Black women to "help protect and advance the health and wellness of Black women and girls."
• It all started with a note in Jessie Jo Dillon's phone. She recalled in a 2021 Songfacts interview: "Last August, I wrote the sentence down in my phone, 'I wanna leave this world better than I found it.' I was so saddened and paralyzed by the state of our country and world at the time. All of this violence, hatred, brutality, and anger seemed to be everywhere I looked. Jimmy Robbins, Laura Veltz, Maren and I are all similar souls and I knew they were feeling it too, so I brought the idea in to them the next day."
  
  She also told us why Maren was the perfect fit for the protest anthem: "Maren is an incredible woman and artist in so many ways, but one of the biggest jewels in her crown is her willingness to use her platform to help people, shed light on hard topics others shy away from, and spread love and equality. We had been talking about old '60s/'70s songs we dug that pointed right at what was going on at that time, and we wanted to do the same about what was going on in our time. It starts with us in our own communities and the small and big things we can do every day to help and speak out for others and ourselves. To quote Dave Chappelle, 'Maybe you can't change the world, but you can make a little corner of it pretty nice.'"