Songfacts®:

• Ingrid Michaelson was in the midst of writing songs for the Broadway musical The Notebook when she started to feel discouraged about the process. She decided to write something completely different that would reflect how she was feeling and came up with "Backyard," a reminder to embrace the present moment and appreciate where you are. She elaborated on the song's meaning in a 2024 Songfacts interview:
  
  "I tend to always find the next thing, the next better thing. Or I'm always looking forward. Rarely am I sitting in my current present moment. I was thinking about the show and is it going to fail, and do I suck? Then I wrote this little song and it just felt like it beautifully encapsulated a goal. I wouldn't say it was where I was, but it's where I wanted to be. I wanted to be in this place where I could stop searching for the next best thing and be grateful for things that I do have. Which is easier to say than to do, obviously, but I do know that I am exceedingly fortunate in my life in all of the ways. I feel like I have to write these songs just to remind myself of that and that's where that song came from."
• For The Dreamers is Michaelson's first studio album in five years (her previous release was 2019's Stranger Things-inspired Stranger Songs.
• Michaelson is known for indie-pop tunes like her quirky breakthrough, "The Way I Am," but her roots are actually in musical theater, which not only made her a perfect fit for composing a Broadway show but also laid the groundwork for her For The Dreamers album. Aside from original songs like "Backyard," she interprets standards like "What A Wonderful World," "You Make Me Feel So Young," and "A Dream Is A Wish Your Heart Makes."
  
  "So, it's a bit of coming home but there's so much lived experience and life between when I was 23 and writing these first songs and when I'm how old I am now and writing them," she noted. "Coming out of writing a musical for seven years, it feels like a natural extension of where my head has been and where my brain has been and sonically what I've been writing. In a lot of ways, I feel like this record was waiting to come out, I just had to find my way back there."
• While Michaelson's work on The Notebook influenced the direction of her album, the two projects are different in terms of style. "Traditional pop, in terms of the genre, that's what I was skating around in a musical-theater place with The Notebook," she explained. "Then with this record, I chiseled it down to that traditional pop, like that post-big band, pre-rock 'n' roll 'crescent roll' of time. That gooey time of music where things sounded magical."