Songfacts®:

• Lucy Dacus put together the tracklist for her sophomore album, Historian, before she was even finished writing all of the songs. She noticed a thread that bound them all together, making the album a song in its own right.
  
  "If taken in one piece, I think the album comes out as a statement," she told The Fader in 2018. "A progression of loss. It's nothing new, but it starts with a breakup ["Night Shift"] and it goes on to loss of control, loss of identity, loss of home, loss of a friend, loss of your life. It's an anxious, darkening progression. But then the album has an upswing. On 'Next of Kin,' I sing, 'I'm content with my death, I can go back to bed,' which is a mentality I hope to maintain. It's about admitting that all of that stuff has to exist and is innate to human experience."
• Dacus found the courage to face her own mortality after watching her grandmother die, an experience that inspired the next track on the album: "Pillar Of Truth." While she's not exactly thrilled about her eventual demise, acknowledging it gave her a kind of freedom to embrace life.
  
  "When you can admit you're going to die - because clearly that is true - you can just decide to live," she told Newsweek in 2018. "It's hard for me to think about all the books I'm not going to read. But I'm still reading books because they're still enjoyable. Time is running out."
• For Historian, Dacus reunited with her friends Jacob Blizard and Collin Pastore, who co-produced her debut album, No Burden. The trio's rapport made it easy to record the album in a tight, one-week timeframe in Nashville.
  
  "Collin and Jacob and I have been working together for so long, that our vocabulary and our pace is the same as it always has been," she explained in an interview with 13 Floor. "It doesn't matter where we'll be, recording is going to feel the same."