Songfacts®:

• From the outside looking in, Lucy Dacus doesn't seem to have a problem with writer's block. She had 30 original songs to choose from for her 2016 debut album, No Burden, and she didn't struggle for content on its follow-up, Historian. But on the latter's track "The Shell," shows she's experienced creative burnout and she encourages others to stay the course in the face of it, singing:
  
  You don't wanna be a creator
  Doesn't mean you've got nothing to say
  Put down the pen, don't let it force your hand.
  
  "The song's about being confident through burnout and knowing that burnout doesn't last forever," Dacus told Newsweek in a 2018 track-by-track interview. "You don't have to make something in order to retain your identity as an artist or a writer or a creative person. A lot of people think they have to be producing in order to maintain that identity."
• In the lyrics, Dacus says her dry spell makes her feel like a nameless ghost wandering an empty street, invisible and forgotten. If she could get a do-over, she sings, "I'd deliver up my shell to be filled with somebody else."
  
  Dacus told Newsweek how the title ties in with the song's theme. "It's also about feeling a kind of emptiness when you're not creating," she said. "And feeling like your life lacks purpose or something. If you're not having ideas, you're just a shell."
• The album is Dacus' first release through the independent record label Matador Records, one of many who clamored to sign her after her critically acclaimed debut. Her labelmate and future girlfriend Julien Baker joined her, along with folk-rocker Phoebe Bridgers, in the supergroup Boygenius. They issued their debut self-titled EP in 2018, the same year Historian dropped.