"'Merry Go 'Round' is a special one. It actually started out from something funny that one of my friend's mom's said," she told Radio.com. "Shane McAnally, he's one of the guys I wrote it with. His mom was talking about one of her neighbors down the street down in Texas and was saying, 'Well, I don't know if she's selling Mary K or Mary Jane, or something down there. I don't know what she's doing.' So it just made us laugh and as songwriters, we were like, 'There's definitely a song in there somewhere.'"

And that there was. Musgraves said that she and songwriters McAnally and Josh Osborne started playing around with all the different kinds of Mary's that they could sing about. "A deeper meaning came to life whenever we started really tossing the idea around. We're all from small towns so we all can relate that way. It's just a special song about life in general and the patterns that you get into. I feel like it's something everyone can relate to."