Country singer-songwriter Maren Morris released her sixth studio album (and her third for Columbia/Sony) at the end of March 2022. It is called Humble Quest and as part of the marketing, Spotify has created a tie-in Humble Quest site.

The site says that it will help you discover your humble quest, but users first have to connect to their Spotify account (of course). Once logged in, you click on the “reveal quest” button.

It plays some soothing acoustic guitar + accordion instrumental music in the background that Shazam was able to tell us was ‘The Little Bumble Bee’ by Gary The Canary. (More on that presently.)

Our first quest card told us to go on a leisurely walk outside and then to share our quest on social media. That basically meant that the site auto-created a little card that could be posted to Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. It said: “Maren Morris just gave me a Humble Quest” and added that others could find theirs at spotify.com/humblequest.

It’s a simple site that subtly alludes to wellness and the role music can play here. And who can take issue with that?

(Disclaimer: we didn’t actually go for a leisurely walk outside as it was threatening to snow on the day we did it. In London. At the end of March. Really. No thank you.)

Side note: we tried to look up Gary The Canary, given the track playing on the website only had 122 Shazams. Gary The Canary has just 429 monthly listeners on Spotify and ‘The Little Bumble Bee’, a track on 2021’s The Happy Cowboy EP, had only clocked up 1,055 plays when we checked.

A bit more digging found out that the song was written by Karin Thyr Eriksson and Göran Eriksson, a Swedish duo who record under the name Thyra. We also found that Gary The Canary goes through Epidemic Sounds.

Thyra have songs with millions of plays on Spotify (like their acoustic covers of ‘How Deep Is Your Love’, ‘Dancing On My Own’ and ‘Firework’), so Gary The Canary seems to be a mood music-centric side project.

Thyra appear to have no association with Maren Morris so it is curious that it is their music, not Maren Morris’s music, that plays in the background on a site promoting her new album. Curious indeed.