I Need To Believe by Alisa Amador

Album: Multitudes (2024)

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In this song, Alisa Amador works out her issues with being a struggling singer-songwriter. She needs to believe in the songs she singing, but that's hard to do when self-doubt creeps in.

Amador wrote the song when coming out of a severe case of writer's block following the death of a friend in 2020. "It's so hard to feel it when you're in writer's block," she told Songfacts. "'I Need To Believe' was one of the first songs I was able to write after years of not being able to write. The way I arrived at being able to write again involved a lot of reverting to childlike ways of approaching artmaking. Because when I first started songwriting, what did I do? One, I didn't judge myself, and two, I didn't expect it to be a product or anything. I had to approach songwriting again from a place of a professional musician with childlike curiosity and wonder and no judgment."
Alisa Amador got a big boost when she won the NPR Tiny Desk Contest in 2022 with her song "Milonga accidental." It happened while she was ready to give up on music. Amador instead found herself playing to much bigger crowds and getting lots of recognition. As she emerged from writer's block, her confidence grew. In 2024 she included "I Need To Believe" on her debut album, Multitudes.
In this song, Amador sings about playing a show in Atlanta and flying back home to Boston, all the way wondering if she's on the right path with her life. It sounds like a journal entry because it is, "almost verbatim what I wrote."

"I never before had written in that way," she told Songfacts. "I had to tell myself, 'It can be bad. You can write bad songs. It's OK. You write because it helps you. It helps accompany you in through difficult moments, or helps you put into words what is hard to put into words. So just write even if it's bad.' I thought that 'I Need To Believe' was a terrible song, but thankfully, I have a manager who lets me know when it's actually good."
Quinn Christopherson, who won the 2019 NPR Tiny Desk Contest, sings backup on this track.

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