The first surfacing of “St. Ferdinand” came from a listing in the ACE Repertory.

Its official public reveal came in a video posted on March 16, 2023 highlighting a secret show at the Toulouse Theatre (presumably the 6:00pm March 11 private event listed on their calendar) where Lauren Daigle performed some of the new songs from her then-upcoming self-titled album in addition to some of her normal material.

Most of the setlist was shown in a few frames of the video (0:05), confirming the song’s appearance on the album. The other new song, “Thank God I Do,” had already been released at this point.

It was later performed at the album preview concert on April 5, 2023 for Lauren Daigle before its full studio release.

The song “Saint Ferdinand” is all about longing for a place that you once loved, but you had to move on. I left Louisiana, moved to Nashville, but Louisiana will always be the core of who I am. But I did pick up new things along the way. Sometimes, when you go through adversity and go through having to learn yourself in a new way, the challenge of a new city or a new place or whatever, it does strengthen you in the long run. It really does teach you and show you what you’re made of. And with this song, it’s all about that journey of feeling like, “Oh, I’m never gonna make it, I’m never gonna survive here.” And then before you know it, you’re falling in love because you allowed yourself to just go through the hurdle of missing home. So on this track we have Natalie Hemby singing background vocals, who represents the Nashville side of my life now, and then Jon Batiste, who played melodica, and he represents home. It just naturally worked that way, too. We didn’t actually have a grandiose plan for that. It just happened. And then when we took a step back, we’re like, wait a second: Even who we got on this track told the story all the greater.

–via Variety