“Your childhood is not something that you notice while it’s happening,” Lucy Dacus articulates to American Songwriter over a Zoom video call. She’s sitting on the floor of her apartment in Philadelphia, propped up against an unmade mattress—the “extra bed” she and her six roommates keep on the living room floor. Backed by an impressive display of carefully arranged books, she apologizes for the “informality” of her cross-legged position. To justify her surroundings, she adds, “It’s the only room in here with decent light.”
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The 26-year-old indie-rocker moved here at the end of 2019. Before, Dacus was at home in Richmond, “taking a break.”
Dacus built momentum between her 2016 debut, No Burden, and the 2018 follow-up, Historian. The notoriety led her to Boygenius—a shape-shifting 2018 collaboration with Phoebe Bridgers and Julien Baker. The trio began from their mutual fandom and together, they wove their spanning rock influences into a six-song self-titled EP.
Boygenius leaked into mainstream popularity, putting Dacus’ name in lights. Yet, back home in Virginia, the breakthrough artist felt stuck. From her childhood bedroom, she weathered the harsh elements of her past. Wounds opened as she emptied the dustpan of indigestible truths about her upbringing.
“It’s hard to know when something really ends,” says Dacus, still wondering what qualifies a person as an “adult.” “While reflecting upon it, I found that when you can say, ‘When I was a child,’ maybe you’re not a child anymore.”
Dacus never intends to write a record. Instead, her pen hits paper in moments of emotive transcendence. She takes inspiration as it comes, monitoring emerging concepts that manifest through the murk.
Being back here makes me hot in the face / Hot blood in my pulsing veins / Heavy memories weighing on my brain, she sings in an illustrative entrance to her third album, Home Video, released June 25 on Matador Records.
Home Video softens the harder, angstier production edges of her past discography to make space for her storytelling. Her tone is temperate enough to tell the truer tales—a critical practice required to close a chapter.
Mixed by Shawn Everett and mastered by Bob Ludwig, the 11-track collection pre-dates the pandemic, with some songwriting dating back to 2017. After three years, a common thread revealed itself within her diary-like lyricism.
“As I wrote, I noticed, ‘Wow, I’m thinking about home a lot, more than anything else.’ I was not thinking about the future or living in the present. I was fully occupied by the past.”
Dacus did not decide one day that she had outgrown Richmond. That realization arrived in increments as the familiar slowly became foreign. One of these moments was a basement show in 2018, similar to those she attended and performed several nights a week before releasing music. Looking around, she saw the booze-induced bliss on unfamiliar teenaged faces that had replaced her “scene.”
“It was a really sad feeling to be like, ‘Is it creepy to be here?” says Dacus. Yet, those pivotal moments carried the artist to what sounds and feels like an arrival. Forced reflection opened creative doors with a key she had unknowingly held for quite some time.
“Things felt different this time around,” she explains. “It was surprising to hear certain things come out of my mouth. I had subconsciously been blocking certain topics or ‘upfrontness.'”
She speculates it’s because of her protective nature. Not just of what she holds dear—emotions, family, close friends—but also people that she doesn’t like. She explains, “I feel like I protect them from themselves. I try to make them not feel bad for making me feel bad. Which is so dumb?”
Just as home video footage can provide a glimpse into intra-familial relationships that would otherwise remain private, Dacus’ third full-length album reveals a candid memoir from a more confident vantage point—free from the judgment of her formerly covert self.
“Something happened, those guards got let down, and I said a bunch of stuff I didn’t realize I needed to say,” she says, surrendering to her subconscious. “I’m still nervous about people hearing it. There are things within this record that make for a good song, but a really complicated relationship.”
Carefully, she navigates a sense of self within her queer identity and a sense of place within a city she feels shrinks with every return visit.
Her song “Going, Going, Gone” strums through her memory reel, reviving the palpable awkwardness of adolescence. Buoyant instrumentation examines a premature relationship through a wiser lens—cringing at the sweaty-palmed boy she locked “lips and brackets” with on a park bench.
“The recording of ‘Going, Going, Gone’ is a single take of me, three guitarists on acoustics, and an entire group of people, shoulder-to-shoulder in the tracking room, just pushing record and stop.”
Two of those voices are Baker and Bridgers. Their studio reunion, Dacus says, was a “time capsule of a moment.”
“It’s really special that we all make space for each other,” she says. “Anything you hear of us singing together feels like a natural result of the thing that’s more important—spending time together.”
As creative collaborators, they initially stepped in to back her devastating vocals on “Please Stay.” As her friends, they stayed on for “Going, Going, Gone” and the album closer “Triple Dog Dare.”
She highlights the nearly eight-minute-long “Triple Dog Dare” as a point of pride from the project. The retrospective lyrics chronicle the slow and still painful demise of a close friendship, questioning what might have been had it not been for her unresolved sexual identity. Baker offered both vocal and emotional support to the open-ended song that feels “closer to a short story.”
In the spirit of saying what she wants now, Dacus speaks truth to her friend, “Christine,” before she must forever hold her peace. The artist wields seemingly gentle words over soothing acoustic instrumentation in a last-ditch effort to prove the unworthiness of the subject’s chosen partner.
She understands the potential implications of telling someone what she doesn’t want to hear. However, the lyrics suggest she’s weighed her options. She sings: I’d rather lose my dignity / Than lose you to someone who won’t make you happy.
En route to Nashville to record the album in August 2019, Dacus encountered unexpected inspiration as they passed one of the countless churches lining Highway 81 advertising “VBS” on their exterior message board. The acronym for Vacation Bible School brought the artist back in time to a summer tradition that once felt integral to her Christianity.
From the van, she began emoting into her notes as she remembered her formative Bible camp experiences. The first verse—In the summer of ’07 / I was sure I’d go to heaven / But I was hedging my bets / At VBS—disguising her sense of humor with impressive vocal delivery.
“VBS” signals Dacus is ready to address certain truths she held from her family. Encouraged by her church-going parents from a young age, the artist derived a moral superiority infused from her religious beliefs. She now eases her residual guilt with humor, attempting to untangle the labyrinth of moral complexities brought about by the Church.
Her sense of humor surrounding the song swells as Dacus shares, “The socialization that goes on there, it’s not as wholesome as parents hope it’s going to be, at least in my experience.” She laughs and adds, “There was definitely weed and people exploring their sexual urges.”
Bible camp was where Dacus found her first boyfriend, whom she describes as “a stoner.”
“I told him if we were going to date, he had to stop smoking weed,” she says. “He obliged but asked if he could keep snorting nutmeg. I told him, ‘I guess that’s fine, it’s legal.'”
Dacus’ vocal levity hedges into heavier rock tones, while the lyrics set the scene of what now feels “cult-like” and distant from her current reality.
“All these kids with their hands up, supposedly ‘moved by the spirit.’ But also not,” she says. “You learn that by watching your parents do it at church. It’s just going through the motions. So there’s a lot to unpack there.”
Her lead single, “Thumbs,” suggests Dacus is certainly done protecting harmful people from themselves. The fan-crazed song takes it a step further, guiding her non-fiction storyline into a horrific fantasy.
“Until that point in my life, that event—which is pretty much note-for-note what happened in the song other than me, um, murdering someone—I had never had, overt, violent urges,” says Dacus. “I felt so desperate and angry that the only solution is for this guy to die. So it was a learning experience to know that was within me.”
The violent urges, it seems, came from a deep place of concern for a friend she witnessed suffer at the hand of an intolerable and emotionally unhealthy father.
“I was snotty-nosed, crying, showing it to her,” the artist recalls when playing it for her friend, the subject’s daughter. “And after listening carefully, she said, ‘This is not a sad song. This is a song about our friendship. And it just makes me think about how grateful I am that you were there for that event.’
“That’s what I have been carrying with me,” she says in somewhat of a conclusion. At first, she felt bad passing the incredulous weight onto the listeners, especially as an introduction. “It’s just like a slog. I was worried they might not come to the record very openly after that.”
Setting those fears aside, Dacus released “Thumbs” on March 9. She had performed the track live for over a year. Admittedly, she needed to practice and asked fans if she could confide in them until it came time to share it more broadly. Not only did they grant that request, but they also became infatuated with the song and even created a Twitter profile titled Has Lucy released Thumbs yet?
“I care about that song a lot, so I’m really happy it landed for people,” she admits with relief.
Beginning in a place of utter vulnerability, Home Video reveals a more complete version of Dacus—one with the confidence to match her prolific artistry.
“I couldn’t tell where I stopped and my surroundings began,” says Dacus. “And so I wanted to tell myself my own stories as honestly as possible to hold a sense of self. So these are very personal, pretty factual stories about things that shaped me. I feel like I know myself better.”
