Songfacts®:

• The song is about the aftermath of a breakup. Lucy Dacus told NPR: "This is the only breakup song I've ever written. For a long time I didn't believe expressing this sort of negativity was productive, but it's less productive to resist the truth of a situation. It's a hopeful song."
• Dacus explained to HMV.com how this song erupted out of her after stirring inside her mind:
  
  "'Night Shift' came to be after many months of confusion and contemplation, like my subconscious had been working at full speed in order to find words for how I was feeling, and once my brain put it together, I had to spit it out. It reminded me of writing 'I Don't Wanna Be Funny Anymore' because it appeared fully baked. The recorded arrangement doesn't differ much from our first try."
• In a 2018 interview with The Fader, Dacus said she made a deliberate choice to open her sophomore album, Historian, with this song because she knew her audience would be able to connect with it. "A breakup song is so immediately relatable," she said. "A first genuine heartbreak is a look into reimagining what your life is going to look like. If you accommodate somebody else and you think they're going to be part of your life and then they're not, you have to reform. The rest of the album has that reforming quality - having the rug pulled out from underneath you, and coming back."
• Dacus also told The Fader the song is really cathartic for her to sing because, at the time, she still wasn't over the relationship. "It was really toxic, but singing the song was such a step towards waking up from many years of being blind to my own needs," she explained. "The song is saying, 'You know what? I don't care anymore and this intensity will fade. One day I'm not going to remember what you're like, I'm not going to remember what I was like with you.' That's so peaceful to me, imagining everything just fading out. It feels really good to sing it really loud. It's like screaming into a pillow, but [the pillow] is a microphone."
• Although the message of the tune is ultimately hopeful, it begins with a cynical confession: "The first time I tasted somebody else's spit, I had a coughing fit."
  
  Dacus told Newsweek the lyrics are about her fumbling through the first blush of romance with a new person. "It was the first time I kissed somebody other than my ex," she admitted in the 2018 interview. "I dated this person for like five years. To kiss anybody else - it felt really weird. It felt kind of wrong. And it wasn't a happy or fulfilling or victorious experience."
• Dacus was just as intentional with the rest of the tracklist as she was with the opener. She told Loud and Quiet the album is an arc that begins in a relatable place with the breakup song and leads the listener deeper into darkness until they find light on the other side.
  
  "The subject matter gets a little more intense, going through identity crises, or loss of home, or loss of faith, loss of a loved one, loss of your life," she explained in 2018. "I feel like I'm pulling people into an uncomfortable space. There's then a change where hopefully I'm turning on a light and saying, 'Yes, all of that exists, but it's a foil to joy.'"
• The album is a chronicle of the emotions Dacus was dealing with throughout 2017, a year full of heartache and loss for the singer, but things were looking up in 2018. Not only did she release Historian to rave reviews, she also joined forces with fellow female rockers Julien Baker and Phoebe Bridgers in the indie supergroup Boygenius. They released their self-titled EP that year and went on to issue a Grammy-winning album in 2023.