Profile—Home Truths
Profile published in The Big Issue, 2021
By Leah Jing McIntosh
Not one to shy away from memoir, Lucy Dacus gets confessional on her third record.
Lucy Dacus doesn’t write love songs. Or, if pressed, maybe “every song is a love song”. Or—“at least that’s a great sentence!” she laughs. Growing up in Richmond, Virginia, the twenty-six-year-old has recently moved to Philadelphia, and is video-calling from a corner of her office. “I’ve never had a space that’s just mine to work in, it makes me feel like lots of things are possible in this room.” This capacious sense of possibility is also present in Home Video, Dacus’ latest record. Her third album, Home Video is an intimate meditation on the complexities of relationships, a reminiscence charting her first love, her lost loves, and her fierce friendships.
Though Home Video depicts her coming-of-age, Dacus has rarely spoken on how she came to music; “It’s because I have bad answers, so nobody likes them!” She never took music lessons, but she grew up singing. “Singing didn’t feel that much different from talking,” she says. “I feel like the real victory is that my parents just didn’t tell me to stop.” Dacus’ previous record, Historian, ended on the image of two lovers writing down each other’s memories; Home Video opens with Dacus alone, weighed down by memory: “Being back here makes me hot in the face/Hot blood in my pulsing veins/Heavy memories weighing on my brain”. With past melding into present, ‘Hot & Heavy’ sets the tone for the album, Dacus’ nostalgia for naïveté striated with a gentle wisdom. “For me, Home Video is about learning that growing up is a process of unlearning things, and keeping what you want to keep,” she says.
Dacus has never strayed too far from memoir, yet she has often obfuscated her subjects, blurring their identities. “I think that up until this point, I’ve been consciously or unconsciously protective of my personal life, and I haven’t wanted my songs to affect my actual relationships,” she says. “I’ve always wanted to leave enough room that the person it’s about maybe wouldn’t know that it’s about them.”
With an intentionally confessional texture, Home Video offers a new intimacy. The song “Thumbs” traces a memory of meeting a friend’s estranged father. Over gentle chords, Dacus sings softly, “I would kill him/if you let me/I would kill him/quick and easy”. On ‘Christine’, she explains to her friend that she would “rather lose my dignity/than lose you” to a bad relationship. Dacus asked for permission from her friends to record the songs. “I haven’t had to do that before,” she reflects. “I don’t write love songs…but I tend to write about my friends often. I have very intense, deep relationships.” Her friends and bandmates from supergroup boygenius—Phoebe Bridgers and Julien Baker—join on vocals for two songs. In ‘Going Going Gone’ the end of the raw take is included; happy with the take, Bridgers squeals “Yay!” as Dacus tells the group, “I owe y’all whatever you ask from me, for the rest of my life.”
Dacus admits that she felt both more and less comfortable writing Home Video: “It felt a lot harder this time around.” There are songs on the album for which she didn’t ask permission; “Brando”, about a lover she wishes would admit “you never knew me/like you thought you did”, and “Partner in Crime”, where, heart “pulpy” on her sleeve, she lies about her age to date an older man. In the latter, she thematises duplicity, warping her voice with autotune. She seems anxious over their reactions. “Maybe I’m wishing I had protected myself in the way I used to, but, I don’t know. I’m trying to not worry about it too much. My recent motto has been to not pre-plan my emotions.”
The album ends with “Triple Dog Dare”, Dacus’ first song to overtly reference queer desire. The song ruminates on the homophobic consequences of crush: “Your mama read my poem / She wouldn’t tell me what it was she saw / but after that you weren’t allowed / to spend the night”. Dacus remarks, “I feel like I hadn’t even really come out to myself that much when I was writing Historian. I think this is the first record that I feel comfortable publicly incorporating that into my identity.”
She finished writing “Triple Dog Dare” in Melbourne in 2019, the first and last place she played it to a crowd. “I write a lot when I’m on tour because it feels like I’m nowhere… I write on planes and on buses and vans and trains, because it feels like I don’t have to answer to anybody.” In Home Video, Dacus answers only to herself. Distilling a bittersweet ache for past selves, she wonders, “if I had paid closer attention / maybe I could take us back to there and then”. Yet in her careful process of unlearning, she refuses to find herself mired in memory. She considers the impossibility of returning to the past, by instead turning towards to the future, with a shifting sense of hope: “the future isn’t worth its weight in gold / the future is a benevolent black hole’. ✷