Nonbeliever

Lucy Dacus told HMV.com the story of this Historian track: "'Nonbeliever' is an amalgamation of three songs, the first of which I wrote in 2011. The three songs were written at totally different times about different circumstances, but none of them felt right. In 2016, I realized what they all had in common and dissected the songs to put the best parts together. Now, it's a song about the moment when expectations crumble, when you realize you can't continue on the path that has been laid out for you. It's an oppressive feeling to look around and believe that everyone else has figured it out while you're lost, but there is solace in knowing that everyone feels that at times."

Dacus grew up in a religious household where attending church and spending summers at Vacation Bible School - which inspired her 2021 song "VBS" - were the norm. In 2018, she told Newsweek that "Nonbeliever" was partly built on a discarded song "about telling my mom that I am not the Christian girl that she raised." She was also inspired by tales of her dad leaving his small hometown to build a life in Chicago, which is evident in the second verse: You say nobody loves a city Nobody loves what can't love 'em back One-way ticket in your pocket What happened to the charm of a small town?

Historian follows Dacus' critically acclaimed debut album, No Burden, a collection of intimate folk-rock tracks she recorded with her childhood friends Jacob Blizard and Collin Pastore. It was meant to be a school project for Blizard, who was studying at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, so Dacus was shocked to learn people outside of her friends and family were listening to it. She teamed up with Blizard and Pastore again on her next album, but it was a much different process now that she knew she was recording for a wider audience. "With Historian, I got to be more intentional, responsible, and aware of what goes into people listening to a record," she told The Creative Independent in 2019. "That filtered into the writing and recording process. People talk about sophomore stress or whatever, and for me it's like sophomore awareness for that record. I wasn't stressed, but I was thinking, 'People are gonna hear this. I want to do the best we can. I want to say things I really believe in. I want people to know something about me that at the core is who I am.'"