Lucy Dacus
Start with the painting, a portrait by Will St. John that is unlike any other image of Lucy Dacus I’ve seen. Draped in gold fabric falling from her shoulders, which she carefully catches and gathers up before it can reveal too much, she’s at once sensual and demure—a heavenly body setagainst azure sky and clouds, a sultry cinquecento icon. And larger than life, at least if we’re meant to take the little cowboy-hatted figure in the bottom right corner (a pilgrim?) as a measure of a scale. “I don’t usually show so much skin,” Dacus told me in a recent conversation—but what’s really shocking about the painting is the sumptuousness of its style: the pearlescent glow of skin, the opulent, meticulously textured gold of the fabric. It’s an apt introduction to Dacus’s fourth album, which is full of lush sounds, many of them new to the Dacus soundscape. If the album’s cover evokes Renaissance painting, the first track reaches even further back, to ancient Greece. It’s purely instrumental, the harmonics of a single violin line slowly building into a rich texture of repeated, overlapping figures. The title—Calliope was the “Chief of the Muses”—suggests an invocation, the traditional opening of Greek epic. When I asked Dacus about this, she said that she wanted this first track to “tune peoples’ attention,” an effect she notices when she plays it for friends. The title is, in part, a tribute to one of her principal collaborators on the album, Phoenix - who plays violin and keyboards and is responsible for some of the album’s new sounds, “if most people's minds have one to ten facets, hers has like a hundred,” Dacus says Dacus’s last album, Home Video, explored the world of childhood and adolescence. Forever Is a Feeling is decidedly adult. The lushness of the album’s sound is matched by a new frankness in Dacus’s approach to sexuality and romance. “So bite me on the shoulder, pull my hair,” Dacus sings on “Ankles.” “Pull me by the ankles to the edge of the bed, and take me like you do in your dreams.” The sex in “Ankles” remains fantasy—as in many of the songs, love doesn’t come easy, desire has to be resisted—but the willingness to talk about it shows a new forthrightness, a new and brave willingness to express desire. The song was originally written as a ballad, Dacus told me, but on the album melancholy has been transfigured. Pulsing strings build to a thick texture of drums, guitars, a dancingly exuberant bass line, and electronics. Frustration becomes flirtatious, playful, full of the excitement of shared attraction. The explicitness of some of the songs isn’t the only way Dacus’s new album inhabits the more troubled territory of adulthood. Love is the great disrupter, and the desire that the would-be lovers resist in “Ankles,” only talking about what they want to do with each other, finally won’t be denied. But starting something new means first the destruction of settled circumstances, and much of the depth of the album comes from facing up to the guilt of seizing the life one wants. “I’m thinking about breaking your heart someday soon,” Dacus sings on “Limerence,” wondering if she can bear “living life as I planned it.” Dacus has taken on dark subject matter before, but there’s a new willingness to address the darkness of the self in the new songs, to see herself as the betrayer. “Why do I feel alive when I’m behaving my worst?” she asks herself, worried that “the stillness” of her settled, “beautiful life … might eat me alive.”Most of the songs on Forever Is A Feeling were written between Fall 2022 and Summer 2024. “I got kicked in the head with emotions,” Dacus told me. “Falling in love, falling out of love.” She had to make peace with the price of the love she wanted. “You have to destroy things in order to create things. And I did destroy a really beautiful life.” We hear the sound of that new love in the album’s most joyful song, “Best Guess,” a new anthem of queer tenderness. The track feels particularly buoyant, in part maybe because of the circumstances under which it was recorded. The last song written for the album, it was finished, Dacus told me, the morning of the session. Before Forever Is a Feeling, Dacus’s most consistent collaborators had been Jake Finch and Collin Pastore . They appear on this new record, but Dacus has widened her circle of collaborators, several of whom appear on this track: Bartees Strange, Andrew Lappin, Melina Duterte (Jay Som), Madison Cunningham, and Chloe Saavedra. “We just kind of sat with it, like band practice,” Dacus told me. “And then we played. We did whole takes, which is unusual for recording these days. I think that song feels so good because we all tracked it at once, and we’re responding to each other.” As is tradition by this point, her boygenius bandmates Julien Baker and Phoebe Bridgers contribute backing vocals on a few songs. Another collaborator on the record is Irish singer-songwriter Hozier, one of Lucy’s favorite artists, who sings on the track “Bullseye.” Another source of joy may be a new candor in Dacus’s storytelling, a new freedom. For the first time in her songs, Dacus, who has had relationships with both men and women , assigns gender to the “you” the song addresses. This is suggested by the opening lines, with their casual sensuality (“Clasping your necklace, zipping your dress”); it’s confirmed near the song’s end: “You may not be an angel, but you are my girl.” Dacus spoke of her nervousness around this decision. “Whenever I’m addressing ‘you’ or someone else in my songs, I've never said ‘he’ or ‘she.’ And I kind of just was like, Be brave and say it: you are my girl, you know. And it feels good to say it. But it’ s another thing that makes me kind of nervous. I blush when I say it, because it narrows down who I could be talking about.” Laughing, Dacus said that she hopes the song will be played at weddings. It will be: the song’s candor, and the particularity of its feeling, make it a song for everyone. Even in “Best Guess,” though, the joy on offer is a tempered joy, a joy aware of the possibility of loss. This makes it, I want to say, an adult joy, the accompaniment of adult love. “I love your body. I love your mind,” the song declares, while also acknowledging that the only real commitments we can make are contingent ones. The song doesn’t promise eternity, the pledge of adolescent infatuation. “You are my best guess at the future,” it says, making only the claims it can. What’s remarkable is that this doesn’t result in a diminishment of love. The wisdom Dacus arrives at in these new songs is that contingency, limitation, mortality, the fact that everything has an end—these things don’t reduce value; instead, they are the source of value. “How luckyare we to have so much to lose,” she sings on “Ankles,” and if there’s irony in the line there’s also hard-earned truth. The possibility of loss isn’t just the price, but the precondition of loving; Dacus’s achievement as an artist in these new songs is to face up to it. Forever is a feeling—and maybe only a feeling. But that’s not to say it’s nothing. Back to that painting, where the album’s title appears tattooed across Dacus’s chest. Tattoos are permanent marks, we think, but they can only last as long as the flesh they’re written on. “You can’t actually capture forever,” Dacus told me. “But I think we feel forever in moments.” She took a beat to think, then said something that struck me as absurdly, profoundly true: “I don’t know how much time I’ve spent in forever, ” she said, “but I know I’ve visited.” Love ends, tattoos fade, flesh falters; even paintings and songs aren’t forever, not really, though these songs will last a long time. To love another mortal being is to cast one’s lot with the temporary. Hard to think of anywhere that has been said more beautifully, or felt more fully, than in the album’s last track, “Lost Time”: Nothing lasts forever but let’ s see how far we get, so when it comes my turn to lose you I’ll have made the most of it.
About
Lucy Dacus
Start with the painting, a portrait by Will St. John that is unlike any other image of Lucy Dacus I’ve seen. Draped in gold fabric falling from her shoulders, which she carefully catches and gathers up before it can reveal too much, she’s at once sensual and demure—a heavenly body setagainst azure sky and clouds, a sultry cinquecento icon. And larger than life, at least if we’re meant to take the little cowboy-hatted figure in the bottom right corner (a pilgrim?) as a measure of a scale. “I don’t usually show so much skin,” Dacus told me in a recent conversation—but what’s really shocking about the painting is the sumptuousness of its style: the pearlescent glow of skin, the opulent, meticulously textured gold of the fabric. It’s an apt introduction to Dacus’s fourth album, which is full of lush sounds, many of them new to the Dacus soundscape. If the album’s cover evokes Renaissance painting, the first track reaches even further back, to ancient Greece. It’s purely instrumental, the harmonics of a single violin line slowly building into a rich texture of repeated, overlapping figures. The title—Calliope was the “Chief of the Muses”—suggests an invocation, the traditional opening of Greek epic. When I asked Dacus about this, she said that she wanted this first track to “tune peoples’ attention,” an effect she notices when she plays it for friends. The title is, in part, a tribute to one of her principal collaborators on the album, Phoenix - who plays violin and keyboards and is responsible for some of the album’s new sounds, “if most people's minds have one to ten facets, hers has like a hundred,” Dacus says Dacus’s last album, Home Video, explored the world of childhood and adolescence. Forever Is a Feeling is decidedly adult. The lushness of the album’s sound is matched by a new frankness in Dacus’s approach to sexuality and romance. “So bite me on the shoulder, pull my hair,” Dacus sings on “Ankles.” “Pull me by the ankles to the edge of the bed, and take me like you do in your dreams.” The sex in “Ankles” remains fantasy—as in many of the songs, love doesn’t come easy, desire has to be resisted—but the willingness to talk about it shows a new forthrightness, a new and brave willingness to express desire. The song was originally written as a ballad, Dacus told me, but on the album melancholy has been transfigured. Pulsing strings build to a thick texture of drums, guitars, a dancingly exuberant bass line, and electronics. Frustration becomes flirtatious, playful, full of the excitement of shared attraction. The explicitness of some of the songs isn’t the only way Dacus’s new album inhabits the more troubled territory of adulthood. Love is the great disrupter, and the desire that the would-be lovers resist in “Ankles,” only talking about what they want to do with each other, finally won’t be denied. But starting something new means first the destruction of settled circumstances, and much of the depth of the album comes from facing up to the guilt of seizing the life one wants. “I’m thinking about breaking your heart someday soon,” Dacus sings on “Limerence,” wondering if she can bear “living life as I planned it.” Dacus has taken on dark subject matter before, but there’s a new willingness to address the darkness of the self in the new songs, to see herself as the betrayer. “Why do I feel alive when I’m behaving my worst?” she asks herself, worried that “the stillness” of her settled, “beautiful life … might eat me alive.”Most of the songs on Forever Is A Feeling were written between Fall 2022 and Summer 2024. “I got kicked in the head with emotions,” Dacus told me. “Falling in love, falling out of love.” She had to make peace with the price of the love she wanted. “You have to destroy things in order to create things. And I did destroy a really beautiful life.” We hear the sound of that new love in the album’s most joyful song, “Best Guess,” a new anthem of queer tenderness. The track feels particularly buoyant, in part maybe because of the circumstances under which it was recorded. The last song written for the album, it was finished, Dacus told me, the morning of the session. Before Forever Is a Feeling, Dacus’s most consistent collaborators had been Jake Finch and Collin Pastore . They appear on this new record, but Dacus has widened her circle of collaborators, several of whom appear on this track: Bartees Strange, Andrew Lappin, Melina Duterte (Jay Som), Madison Cunningham, and Chloe Saavedra. “We just kind of sat with it, like band practice,” Dacus told me. “And then we played. We did whole takes, which is unusual for recording these days. I think that song feels so good because we all tracked it at once, and we’re responding to each other.” As is tradition by this point, her boygenius bandmates Julien Baker and Phoebe Bridgers contribute backing vocals on a few songs. Another collaborator on the record is Irish singer-songwriter Hozier, one of Lucy’s favorite artists, who sings on the track “Bullseye.” Another source of joy may be a new candor in Dacus’s storytelling, a new freedom. For the first time in her songs, Dacus, who has had relationships with both men and women , assigns gender to the “you” the song addresses. This is suggested by the opening lines, with their casual sensuality (“Clasping your necklace, zipping your dress”); it’s confirmed near the song’s end: “You may not be an angel, but you are my girl.” Dacus spoke of her nervousness around this decision. “Whenever I’m addressing ‘you’ or someone else in my songs, I've never said ‘he’ or ‘she.’ And I kind of just was like, Be brave and say it: you are my girl, you know. And it feels good to say it. But it’ s another thing that makes me kind of nervous. I blush when I say it, because it narrows down who I could be talking about.” Laughing, Dacus said that she hopes the song will be played at weddings. It will be: the song’s candor, and the particularity of its feeling, make it a song for everyone. Even in “Best Guess,” though, the joy on offer is a tempered joy, a joy aware of the possibility of loss. This makes it, I want to say, an adult joy, the accompaniment of adult love. “I love your body. I love your mind,” the song declares, while also acknowledging that the only real commitments we can make are contingent ones. The song doesn’t promise eternity, the pledge of adolescent infatuation. “You are my best guess at the future,” it says, making only the claims it can. What’s remarkable is that this doesn’t result in a diminishment of love. The wisdom Dacus arrives at in these new songs is that contingency, limitation, mortality, the fact that everything has an end—these things don’t reduce value; instead, they are the source of value. “How luckyare we to have so much to lose,” she sings on “Ankles,” and if there’s irony in the line there’s also hard-earned truth. The possibility of loss isn’t just the price, but the precondition of loving; Dacus’s achievement as an artist in these new songs is to face up to it. Forever is a feeling—and maybe only a feeling. But that’s not to say it’s nothing. Back to that painting, where the album’s title appears tattooed across Dacus’s chest. Tattoos are permanent marks, we think, but they can only last as long as the flesh they’re written on. “You can’t actually capture forever,” Dacus told me. “But I think we feel forever in moments.” She took a beat to think, then said something that struck me as absurdly, profoundly true: “I don’t know how much time I’ve spent in forever, ” she said, “but I know I’ve visited.” Love ends, tattoos fade, flesh falters; even paintings and songs aren’t forever, not really, though these songs will last a long time. To love another mortal being is to cast one’s lot with the temporary. Hard to think of anywhere that has been said more beautifully, or felt more fully, than in the album’s last track, “Lost Time”: Nothing lasts forever but let’ s see how far we get, so when it comes my turn to lose you I’ll have made the most of it.
