Songfacts®:

• "History" opens The Boy Who Played the Harp, Dave's third album, released October 24, 2025, and it feels like exactly that: a curtain rising on an artist taking stock of his journey. The song is a collaboration with James Blake, and together they craft a track that stitches South London realism to celestial ambition.
• The song starts with Dave framing his path as divinely guided:
  
  This is God's plan, He said it to me
  An angel either side of my bed in a dream
  
  This biblical imagery connects to the album's title, which references King David, the biblical figure who played the harp to soothe King Saul's troubled mind.
• Throughout the verses, Dave rewinds his own timeline, from selling CDs in Paris to topping charts, and muses on what it means to turn survival into storytelling. He tips his hat to the genres that raised him - grime, jungle, and garage - before casting himself in marble, rapping:
  
  The woman with me like a Renaissance paintin'
  I'm Michelangelo's David
  
  It's a callback not just to the album's artful title, but also to Dave's own habit of self-mythologizing, something we heard before in tracks like "Psycho" and "Streatham."
• James Blake's ethereal refrain acts like the song's conscience. He also slips in a delicate bridge about fame's transience, the way success fades almost as soon as you notice it's there.
• Dave previously collaborated with James Blake on "Both Sides of a Smile" from the rapper's We're All Alone in This Together album, released in July 2021. Blake also joins Dave on another The Boy Who Played the Harp track, "Selfish."
• Dave, Blake, and Dom Maker (half of Mount Kimbie) produced the track. Maker's presence brings continuity to Blake's sound; he previously worked on Blake's albums Assume Form, Friends That Break Your Heart and Playing Robots into Heaven.