WRITING HER OWN HISTORY
Lucy Dacus titled her second album “Historian,” which is a subtly heavy name for a recording. Historians heft a lot of weight, and their accounts of happenings bear subtle shadings of their perspective. So the title of this recording by a gifted young songwriter from Richmond, Va., refers to her role as documentarian, but also interpreter of what she documents.
In this case, she’s tracking a breakup, the aftermath of that split and some other happenings in her life. And she doesn’t pull punches. “The first time I tasted somebody else’s spit, I had a coughing fit,” she sings, the first line on the album.
Dacus is 23, but writes with a disarming frankness that provides a brilliant balance to the emotional transparency in her songs. The new record picks up wonderfully from her 2016 release, “No Burden,” and positions her as a singer and songwriter worth tracking across years. She plays White Oak Music Hall on Friday and talked about the new record.
Q: The album title implies a certain distance that we expect from historians. But it also makes clear that the narrator and historian is involved in the history as well as the telling of it.
A: So the album title is “Historian” and it’s also a song title. One thought behind that is that I acknowledge that I’m one of the historians in that song. And I see myself as a historian through the whole album. There’s a distance when it comes to telling a history. The moment you write it down, it ends the moment in one way. If there’s mourning that goes on there, you try to capture it. But looking back, you’re still innately distilling something. And there can be beauty in that. There can be worth in that. But it’s also less than the full account of what happened. Also, history is innately supposed to be shared. So these stories I’m telling, I find value in them personally. But they also take on more value when I share them and people listen.
Q: Are there reservations about being so frank?
A: Not really. Because I know firsthand how I’ve benefited from people sharing their histories with me. History always contains a lesson. There’s so much to learn about the past. Not only what history is, but how it’s told. So I think expressing one’s own history is something innately worthwhile to pursue. I’ve been journaling since I was 10. So I feel like I’ve been amassing this history that’s 2,000 pages now. And even if it all went up in flames, I’d still have benefited from the act of getting down my own voice and the process of telling myself my own history.
Q: There’s a line in one song, “In five years I hope the songs feel like covers.” It’s interesting because it’s so insular as far as it being a musical reference. But it also nicely conveys the passing of time. I’m a bit time obsessed, I divvy my days into 15-minute units. The song made me wonder if you were time obsessed?
A: Yeah, I think I wake up and try to plan the day by the hour. Maybe not quite like your 15-minute increments. But there are similarities. Sometimes I’m scared of time. In the midst of some emotion, you can’t conceptualize how time is going to change your heart and mind. But I try to enjoy that more. That’s part of what happened when I wrote “Night Shift.” I realize, if anything, time is on my side. So I have time to go out to the rough edges of feelings. And I can see something, not as loss but as growth. I want to welcome it instead of running from it.
Q: “Addiction” is an interesting play on the word. It’s a different point of view for something that has few connotations that aren’t purely negative.
A: Yeah, addiction in this case is something that provides direction. It’s not the big uses that people usually find in songs about having an addiction. But here it’s something you can focus your thoughts on and center your life on. In that way, addiction and obsession kind of go hand in hand. I’m afraid of addiction in general. It sounds lame, but I don’t even drink coffee. I don’t want to be reliant on anything. But at the same time, I feel like I’m reliant on people. So you find these cycles that are hard to break out of. Feeling like you “need” somebody is super unhealthy. And writing that song helped me see some patterns that I’ve been better at breaking since.