Songfacts®:

• "Before Believing" appears on Emmylou Harris' 1975 album Pieces of the Sky, her major-label solo debut and the record that established her as a country-rock force following the death of her duet partner and mentor, Gram Parsons, in 1973. Produced by Brian Ahern, the song was tracked in Los Angeles using Ahern's mobile Enactron Truck, as well as Track Recorders in Silver Spring, Maryland.
• The song was written by North Carolina guitarist Danny Flowers, who first met Harris in Greensboro, North Carolina, when both were young and largely unknown. Flowers later moved to Nashville, where he shared a house on Blair Boulevard with fellow musicians, including Rodney Crowell.
  
  Crowell would soon become a member of Harris's backing group, the Hot Band, contributing songs and harmony vocals to several of her mid-1970s albums. The two remained frequent collaborators, including recording two duet albums in the 2010s.
  
  Flowers later became much better known for writing "Tulsa Time," which Don Williams took to #1 on Billboard's country chart in 1979. Eric Clapton subsequently covered it and reached #30 on the Hot 100. Flowers also co-wrote "Gulf Coast Highway" with Nanci Griffith and James Hooker, a song recorded by Griffith and, two years later, by Harris in a duet with Willie Nelson.
• The song starts with Harris' straightforward confession to a partner: "I told you everything I could about me." From there, she urges him towards belief rather than fear, insisting that faith itself can provide the reassurance they are searching for.
• The line that gave the album its name arrives in the second verse:
  
  How would you feel if the world was falling apart around you
  Pieces of the sky were falling in your neighbor's yard, but not on you?
  
  The lyric paints a quietly uncomfortable picture: watching someone else's world collapse while your own stays safe. The song suggests that this is the moment to step up and act, tying directly back to the theme of having faith in someone before you have all the guarantees.
• For Harris, the track's emotional roots went back to folk legend Townes Van Zandt. "I was thinking of Townes when I sang 'Before Believing,' how he brought something entirely new to folk," Harris recalled to Mojo. She traces the song's sound back to the Townes Van Zandt she heard at Gerde's Folk City in New York in the late 1960s.
• Vocally, "Before Believing" shares strong melodic roots with "Love Hurts," the Boudleaux Bryant ballad Harris recorded as a duet with Gram Parsons during the summer 1973 sessions for his album Grievous Angel, released in January 1974, four months after Parsons died of a drug overdose. "Love Hurts" remained a staple of Harris's solo shows for decades after. That vocal echo links "Before Believing" back to her time with Parsons, even though, unlike the album's true elegy, "Boulder to Birmingham," Flowers' song isn't about loss or mourning.