Songfacts®:

• Lucy Dacus is placing her bets on love with "Best Guess," the second single from her 2025 album, Forever Is A Feeling. The singer knows that romance is a gamble, that both of their bodies and minds will change over time, but she's almost certain her current relationship is built to last. "You are my best guess at the future," she sings.
  
  Dacus, who came out as queer in a 2016 interview with NPR, always shied away from specifying pronouns in her love songs so everyone in her fanbase, regardless of their sexuality, could relate to them. But that all changed with "Best Guess," inspired by her relationship with fellow indie rocker Julien Baker, which finds her overtly saying, "You are my girl."
• In the bridge, Dacus recalls how Baker was her best friend long before they became lovers. The pair met in 2016 - the same year Dacus released her debut album, No Burden - when she opened for Baker at a gig in Washington, DC. They became fast friends and formed the supergroup boygenius, along with Phoebe Bridgers, two years later. Baker and Bridgers both contributed backing vocals to Forever Is A Feeling.
• The bridge references the nursery rhyme "Here Is The Church, Here Is The Steeple," which has accompanying hand gestures to mimic the structure of the church with the fingers representing the people inside: "Here is the church, here is the steeple, open the doors and see all the people." Instead, Dacus adds a twist to the rhyme to connect with Baker over her disillusionment with faith, singing:
  
  Here is the church
  Here is the steeple
  You were looking for saints
  But you only found people
  
  Both artists grew up in devout Christian households and became critical of organized religion as adults.
• The album cover features an oil painting of Dacus tucked away in a museum's storage room. The painting, created by Brooklyn-based artist Will St. John, ties in with the romantic theme of the album as Dacus explores love through the ages. St. John is known for his Renaissance-style portraits using people across the LGBTQ spectrum as his subjects, including Dacus, shown draped in a gold cloth with the album title tattooed across her bare chest.
• One of the instruments featured on the track is a celesta, a piano-like instrument that produces a delicate bell sound. You've heard it before on Tchaikovsky's "The Nutcracker Suite," but it's an atypical sound for a Lucy Dacus record.
  
  With its lush instrumentation the album as a whole is a sonic departure from its lo-fi, indie-rock predecessor, Home Video (2021). "I was thinking about love songs through time," she explained in a 2025 Los Angeles Times interview. "I wanted to connect these songs back to a history of love. So there's violins, there's harpsichord, there's harps - there's a lot in the arrangements that make it feel older or classic or something."
• Forever Is A Feeling is Dacus' first release through a major label. She was formerly signed to the independent label Matador Records, which issued her first three albums, but struck a deal with Geffen Records for her fourth. The move afforded her the opportunity to expand her vision for the album.
  
  "Matador was great for a starting point. But I did almost everything myself - there was pretty much no money for anything," she told the Los Angeles Times. "I didn't want to pretend for this that I'm still on an indie label. So let's get the oil painting for the album cover, let's go to Paris for a music video, let's commission a Rodarte dress. I wanted to highlight people who are putting so much study and skill into craftsmanship."
• Dacus' first-time use of female pronouns in the song inspired its music video, which she directed. In the clip, the singer and her crew of "hot masc" (masculine-presenting) celebs like actress/model Cara Delevingne, MUNA guitarist Naomi McPherson, singer/guitarist Towa Bird, and TikTok star Mattie Westbrouck donning suits and engaging in stereotypical dude activities, like smoking cigars, playing poker, and arm-wrestling.
  
  "I was like, "Let's just make it my bachelor party and I'm in a suit and room, and I have all of my suave men of honor around me," Dacus told People in 2025, "kind of in this '90s Calvin Klein blown-out style evoking a little bit of one of my favorite music videos of all time, Janelle Monáe's 'Q.U.E.E.N,' which is all black and white, dancing and minimal set design, but just cool movement, basically."
• Bartees Strange, who co-produced the song and played the triangle on it, caught wind of the tune early on in the studio but it ended up being the last ones recorded for the album.
  
  "This song was something she hummed the entire time we were in the studio. I thought we might get to record something from scratch maybe with our time together, and really hoped it would be what she hummed," he explained on Instagram. "The cool thing about this song to me is most of the record was done when we recorded it, so we sort of had this chance to create something brand new while referencing all of the other sounds that were swirling around."