Video star: Lucy Dacus, Lead Album,
Virginian singer-songwriter freeze-frames formative scenes from her past on impressive third album. By Victoria Segal. Illustration by Ian Wright.
“Dacus zeroes in on grey areas. She feels it when people disappoint, miss their cues, fail to reciprocate.”
Lucy Dacus ★★★★ Home Video MATADOR. CD/DL/LP
LAST YEAR, with lockdown time on her hands, Lucy Dacus started to type up her old diaries (13 volumes in all). “I got to 100,000 words and that was only journal number four,” she tells MOJO, “so there’s a lot going on there.” She also keeps an extensive catalogue of home videos, taken by her parents. “I like that weird feeling of ‘Oh my gosh, I was an annoying kid,’” she says. “It’s very humbling.”
So far, the 25-year-old singer-songwriter (and alongside Phoebe Bridgers and Julien Baker, member of indie supergroup Boygenius) hasn’t hidden her tendency to archive, document, keep emotional receipts. She titled her 2018 album Historian, a record that stored the details of break-ups and bereavements and, on its closing track, wondered who gets to control the narrative of a relationship. On her third album, Home Video, Dacus continues her recording, but this time, she digs further into the vaults. Feeling rootless since her 2016 debut No Burden triggered years of touring, she felt herself drawn back to her origin stories, her adolescence in the suburbs of Virginia’s state capital Richmond, placing key scenes and situations from her youth under the microfiche reader for close analysis.
While she taps into universally resonant themes with these songs – the limits of friendship, the pain of unrequited love, self-esteem and sexual identity, parents who go mad if you’re late home – Dacus is too smart to deal in easy tear-and-share nostalgia. Her Christian upbringing gives a crisp specificity to Christine, an ambiguous love song that mentions “a sermon saying how bent on evil we are”, or VBS (it stands for Vacation Bible School), a quietly devastating vignette about her first churchcamp boyfriend. Secular seductions – listening to Slayer, bad poetry, “snorting nutmeg in your bunkbed” – clash with the opening line, “In the summer of ’07/I was sure I’d go to heaven”. It’s not the only song where the adult world looms ominously, but it highlights Dacus’s ability to zoom out from tiny detail into big picture. “You said that I showed you the light/But all it did in the end/Was make the dark feel darker than before,” she sings, over unstable bursts of guitar and organ, a line that could have come straight from the old Bill Callahan songbook.
If the album’s title suggests VHS footage full of wobble and flare, Dacus never descends into retro pastiche, elegantly co-producing with long-term Richmond collaborators Collin Pastore and Jacob Blizard (as well as Jake Finch). There’s conspicuous Auto-Tune on Partner In Crime, its hint of pop worldliness reflecting the song’s grown-up secrets and ebbing innocence, but nothing is overstated. It’s softer and spacier than No
Burden or Historian, sleepy piano running through Christine, Going Going Gone’s willow-weave country sweetened further by backing vocals from Bridgers and Baker. Live favourite Thumbs – a Twitter account called Has Lucy Released Thumbs Yet? has been tracking its status for months – is a revenge fantasy about killing a friend’s toxic dad that’s delivered like a prayer, Dacus contemplating evisceration over cloudy, high-windowed keyboard. Storytelling this tight doesn’t leave a lot of space around it for interpretation, but as an old-fashioned issue song – a trace of Suzanne Vega or 10,000 Maniacs – with a modern gloss, it’s a powerful display of strength.
At other times, Dacus almost maintains a stenographer’s distance, keeping a careful, fluent account but refusing to let emotion distort the record. “My heart’s on my sleeve/It’s embarrassing,” she sings on Partner In Crime. “The pulpy thing, beating.” Hot And Heavy, structured with skipping-song simplicity, describes a complicated attempt to go home again, memories of teenage passion in a suburban basement leaving her “hot in the face”, people turning into volatile compounds as years pass: “You used to be so sweet/ Now you’re a firecracker on a crowded street.”
It’s a gift to be this lucid, especially given how Home Video’s songs often worry at the problems of really knowing other people. Dacus zeroes in on grey areas – of communication, love, sexuality, friendship. She feels it when people disappoint, miss their cues, fail to reciprocate. On Going Going Gone, there’s an Americana snapshot of a braces-wearing teenage boy who 10 years later is “grabbing asses, spilling beers”. The bitterly funny Brando is about another boy who tries to “educate” the young Dacus via cinema trips, a junior mansplainer who treats her as if she’s a teenage Eliza Doolittle. “You called me cerebral/I didn’t know what you meant,” sings Dacus on one of the album’s sharpest lyrics. “But now I do/Would it have killed you to call me pretty instead?” Cartwheel’s sombre reverie, with its downward-spiral percussion and gentle despair, catches the pain of a friendship splitting apart, old dependencies ruined by new prospects of love and sex; while the closing Triple Dog Dare brings together repressed sexuality, religion, and fear of death in one poignant snapshot of thwarted connection.
In Brando, the teenagers visit a cinema where “They play oldies in the afternoon for the elderly and me and you/Fred and Ginger, black and white/I watch you watch It’s A Wonderful Life”. Yet that’s not Dacus’s kind of nostalgia: her interests lie not in immaculate cinema classics but in making sense of memory, its vivid home-taping striped by ticking timecodes and distorted by sudden static. “In five years I hope the songs feel like covers/ Dedicated to new lovers,” she sang on Historian’s Night Shift, expecting the meaning of her songs to change with the years. With Home Video, however, Dacus finds the pages of her diary she just can’t shake, turning them into songs that are destined to stay with you, too. After all, there’s a lot going on there.