Last year, Lucy Dacus almost crumbled under the staggering load of anticipation.

A rising singer and songwriter with a new record deal and an intensifying air of next-big-thing-ness, Ms. Dacus was forced to weather real life — including health issues, mounting personal responsibilities and the ambient stress of political turmoil — while also focusing on what had all of a sudden become her job. In Nashville last March, she made her second album — the first with any expectations attached, the one that is supposed to change her life. Then she had to wait for it to come out.

During that uneasy downtime, Ms. Dacus thought a lot about what her emotionally raw and intimate new work might mean to people — the album, “Historian,” is out March 2 on the storied independent label Matador — and also about what it meant to make music her career.

At a time of immense technological and aesthetic change in the industry, Ms. Dacus, based in Richmond, Va., is a timeless model: a guitar-based, album-oriented songwriter with a big, unadulterated voice and tattooable lyrics. But as she prepared to take the ambitious jump from local band to national act, opener to headliner, amateur to professional, Ms. Dacus, 22, was grappling with what it’s like to be a winner of that lottery and a product of the hype machine that keeps modern indie rock humming.

“I never considered a career in music because it was too unattainable,” she said, just a few years removed from dropping out of film school and taking a seasonal job as a photo editor for yearbooks and class pictures. “I just didn’t believe it was possible.”