“Bible school was replete with drama.”
Lucy Dacus speaks to Victoria Segal.
What sent you back to childhood this time around?
“I wrote a lot of the songs in 2018; even Hot And Heavy I wrote in 2017, so this train of thought has been chugging along for a long time. Once I started touring my first record, No Burden, I was away from home so much that I felt this depersonalisation – like I didn’t know who I was without being at home. I think I had this impulse to ground myself in the past, which actually kind of worked. It’s more comforting to me than the future.”
Your songs are so personal and specific, do you worry about the subjects coming to find you?
“That’s one of my biggest sources of anxiety right now because there’s a lot of songs that are on the record that are about people I haven’t spoken to for a really long time. I think in my previous records I’ve been really careful about not writing about people that I wouldn’t want to hear from, but that cut me off from a lot of material. If people reach out to me, I am prepared to talk to them – it just makes my stomach hurt to think about it.”
There’s a song on Home Video called VBS, which stands for Vacation Bible School – did you like it there or was it a trigger for rebellion?
“At the time I really liked it because I really wanted things to happen in my life and Vacation Bible School was replete with drama: there was friendship drama, there was romance, there was the drama of being really emotional about God, meeting new people from different towns – it felt like one of the only accesses to drama. I didn’t get a satisfactory rebellion though. In college over the course of the years, without noticing, I just stopped going to church. I realised that I just didn’t believe some of the things or kept reframing them and reframing them until the point where I was ‘should I actually call myself a Christian?’ I wish that I had had a more remarkable rebellion but it was more like a slow fade that I didn’t notice was happening.”
You grew up listening to Christian rock and musical theatre – can you trace those influences in your music’s DNA?
“I think if anything both of those forms of music serve a real purpose: for worship it’s a connection point and for musicals it has to make the plot go forward, so I guess that I always thought of songwriting as more of a communication device than a fine art type of thing. I don’t think that there’s much of a Christian rock or musical theatre influence detectable. Hopefully not, because I think that both of those genres are a little overwrought.”
Is your music a reaction against it, then?
“Maybe. I tried so hard to be so perfect for those settings. I sang in the church band. I was in musicals because my mom was a musical theatre director, but I’ve never been any good at being anything other than myself. I wish that I could put on a persona but I’ve never been larger than life – I’ve just been… life.”