How we wrote Maren Morris’ ‘The Bones’ by Laura Veltz

The Country Music Association Song of the Year that was inspired by a real estate agent and inspired a nation

Last year saw songwriter Laura Veltz operating at a level of sustained success and productivity few of her peers could match. Indeed, it saw her contribute to nearly 40 releases across pop, country, hip hop, and Christian music in a single year. Her work during that period spanned artists such as Jessie Murph, Demi Lovato, Maren Morris, Lauren Spencer Smith, and BigXthaPlug and has been rewarded with a Grammy Songwriter of the Year nomination.

A four-time Grammy nominee and former Billboard Songwriter of the Year, Veltz first made her name in Nashville with defining hits including Dan + Shay’s Speechless, before expanding her reach far beyond Music City. Alongside her songwriting, she has emerged as a leading advocate for the craft, co-chairing the Recording Academy’s Songwriters & Composers Wing and hosting the Songwriter Soup podcast.

Maren Morris’ The Bones feels like an important song in Veltz’s journey, signposting the route she would subsequently follow. At its heart is the supportive relationship with country singer Morris – one which continues to this day. Working with someone brave enough to go against what might have been expected from a Nashville songwriting room and, with the help of co-writer Jimmy Robbins, a song was born that transcended its genre and became a beacon of hope during the COVID pandemic. A multi-platinum smash that topped several charts, The Bones also proved to be an award favourite, picking up Country Music Association awards for both Single of the Year and Song of the Year, and the Academy of Country Music’s Song of the Year.

Here, Vetz reveals how her search for a new home inspired a sleeper hit…

Check out Jenn Bostic’s Songs In The Key Of Country Pop

Released: 22 February 2019
Artist: Maren Morris
Label: Columbia Nashville
Songwriter: Maren Morris, Jimmy Robbins, Laura Veltz
Producer: Greg Kurstin
UK Chart Position: –
US Chart Position: 12

“I love this song, it’s just a huge source of pride. This song was written in the absolute traditional Nashville way, the way that I was trained for… you write down a title, you go in, you throw shit at the wall, and you see what happens. I wrote down The Bones, because I was looking for a house with my husband and the real estate agent kept saying, ‘It’s got good bones.’ And it was like, ‘Do we want this? It’s got good bones.’ Or, ‘We should think about a reno, it has good bones.’

“She kept saying it, and she said it in a very cute way, which just caught my ear. I guess it was her accent or something. She’s a very entertaining woman. I wrote it down because I do have this belief that almost any phrase or object, if you add love to it, there’s a song there. Every object. I play this game with myself all the time… I’m sitting in a room and there’s a fireplace, curtains, there’s a door, a mirror… if you add love to any of those items, a song will somehow emerge.

“So, I write down The Bones and I bring it into, at that point, my weirdest collaborator. By that, I mean, Maren is willing to get weird. It doesn’t sound crazy now, but back then, that was an insane title, but she was like, ‘Oh, I love it.’

“I was looking for a house, I think she was getting married, and Jimmy Robbins, our co-writer, was about to have a baby. We were all in these very pivotal times as human beings – big, big changes and big, big life events. We just all put our own experiences into the concept. We’d been through a lot together.

“It’s almost like Shania Twain’s, “Looks like we made it.” You know that song, You’re Still The One? We wanted to kind of mirror that, like, ‘Hey, we did it. We got through the hard part.’ “The wolves came and went,” is still one of my favourite lyrics in that song. “And we’re still standing,” it’s like, ‘We did it!’

Laura Veltz: “We really wrote the right words for an event that we had no idea was coming.” Photo: Mike Beyer

“That song resonated with people for a million reasons, but I think the reason it got so big is because… people were aware of it before the pandemic and then it just went into hyperspeed after the pandemic. People were going, ‘We’re gonna to be okay, we’re gonna get through it.’ And I think that the song really resonated with people, because we were all in a crisis, and the idea that I got to participate in a song that made people feel hopeful at an absolutely hopeless time is my whole purpose and it’s an amazing thing.

“I will never look back on that time and not be like, ‘Wow!’ I got to hold people’s hand in this indirect way. You know, the first two lines of the song are, “We’re in the home stretch/Of the hard times.” I feel like everyone was just willing that phrase to be true during the pandemic, like, ‘Please. Are we almost out of it?’ Remember when it was like, ‘It’ll be over in two weeks.’ And then it was a year, and then it was two, we were all just going, ‘Please!’

“Particularly in America… I don’t know how it hit you all, but our country was feeling on the edge, with people going like, ‘But we’re America, we’re going to get through this, right?’ Those lyrics pulled right in to people’s current events, and their inner voice, and I think that’s why it was so big. That’s just a guess. I think the song is amazing, but I think the timing was really what made that song go hyperspeed. It was really just watching people love it, and people’s narratives around it.

“Greg Kursten produced it, and he’s like a magician. He did all the Adele stuff. He’s crazy. I remember being in Maren’s kitchen, listening to it and being like, ‘Whoa. This feels like a massive hit song.’ But then, that’s just music industry speak, you know what I mean, the thing that made it register was when people would say, you know, ‘My sister’s going through cancer, and this song means everything to us.’ It was that, the little stories and people applying their lives to the song.

Laura Veltz: “You write down a title, you go in, you throw shit at the wall, and you see what happens.” Photo: Big Machine Music

“People saying, like, ‘Hey, I feel like this is an American song. We’re gonna get through this hard time.’ Everybody applied it in these micro and macro ways, and every time it came on the radio, I think I cried, because I was just so moved by our lyrics. But the lyrics weren’t written during the tragedy, so it was weird. It was almost like a Ghost of Christmas Past/Ghosts of Christmas Future kind of a feeling. We really wrote the right words for an event that we had no idea was coming. You know, yeah, that’s

“I care about awards when it’s my peers. There’s this award ceremony in Nashville called the NSAI “10 Songs I Wish I’d Written”. That event is pretty sick, it makes me feel like, ‘Wow, my peers think I’m cool.’ There was a year when there was no event; it was 2020 and it was really sad. But I had three songs on that 10-song list [The Bones, Speechless by Dan + Shay, What If I Never Get Over You by Lady A], and, of course, no one knew, because it was like, ‘We’ll send you an email congratulations.’ To this day, I don’t think anyone knows how huge that to me, that I had three songs on this peer-voted list.

“But I mean, awards only mean something to me because they already happened, if that makes sense. I was never vying to get nominated for anything. I’ve never really thought about it in a way that was like, ‘Now this will make me feel good about me.’ I have too much fun in my daily life to give a shit about accolades. I don’t hang plaques on my wall. I don’t display trophies. It’s not because I’m cooler than anyone else. It’s not that at all. It’s really just that it’s not the metric that means anything to me. The metric is: whatever I’m going to write in a few hours after I get off the phone, that’s what I get excited about.

“I do want to say, though, the one amazing thing about having award nominations and exciting things like that is, you’re given an opportunity to advocate for songwriters. I believe in this art form, and nominations and awards, if the result of getting nominated is an opportunity to express how important this art is for the human race, that is the win to me.”

Read our feature interview with Laura Veltz in the latest issue of Songwriting Magazine, follow her on instagram.com/lauraveltz and check out Laura’s podcast Songwriter Soup

Check out Jenn Bostic’s Songs In The Key Of Country Pop

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