FEATURE:
Modern Heroines
PHOTO CREDIT: Ebru Yıldız
has recorded two other studio albums and is in a group with Phoebe Bridgers and Julien Baker (boygenius), I am going to focus on her latest studio album, Home Video. The twenty-six-year-old released it back in June. It is one of the best albums from this year. Her previous solo albums, No Burden (2016) and Historian (2018), are fantastic. I feel she is producing her best work right now. Maybe it is the collaboration in boygenius that has added something to her solo work. I will end with a couple of reviews for Home Video. As someone who I think is a modern-day star who is going to influence a lot of other artists, I want to dive deep and feature a few interviews. We get to learn more about Dacus’ upbringing and the inspirations behind Home Video. If you do not own Home Video, then do make sure that you go and get a copy:
“This new gift from Dacus, her third album, was built on an interrogation of her coming-of-age years in Richmond, VA. Many songs start the way a memoir might—“In the summer of ’07 I was sure I’d go to heaven, but I was hedging my bets at VBS”—and all of them have the compassion, humour, and honesty of the best autobiographical writing. Most importantly and mysteriously, this album displays Dacus’s ability to use the personal as portal into the universal. “I can’t hide behind generalizations or fiction anymore,” Dacus says, though talking about these songs, she admits, makes her ache.
PHOTO CREDIT: Ebru Yıldız
That Home Video arrives at the end of this locked down, fearful era seems as preordained as the messages within. “I don’t necessarily think that I’m supposed to understand the songs just because I made them,” Dacus says, “I feel like there’s this person who has been in me my whole life and I’m doing my best to represent them.” After more than a year of being homebound, in a time when screens and video calls were sometimes our only form of contact, looking backward was a natural habit for many. If we haven’t learned it already, this album is a gorgeous example of the transformative power of vulnerability. Dacus’s voice, both audible and on the page, has a healer’s power to soothe and ground and reckon”.
It is a bit early to do the best-of lists in terms of 2021 albums. I would be shocked if Lucy Dacus’ Home Video was not in the higher spots. It is such a rich album where Dacus demonstrates one she is one of the finest songwriters of her generation. I am excited to see what comes next for her. I would love to hear more boygenius music (their eponymous E.P. arrived in 2018). She is an incredible talent that is going to provide the world with plenty more phenomenal music.
The first interview I want to introduce is from CLASH. In addition to discovering more about Home Video, we also learn about her home in Virginia:
“The sleepy streets of Richmond were laced with recollections; her first kisses, falling outs and the childhood friends who have come and gone as the years pass by, and just like that she was lost, in a land that had such a strong grasp on her identity. The inspiration behind her highly anticipated third album ‘Home Video’, Lucy crafts an audible time machine from the ground up, diving head first into her hippocampus and delivering a hopeful, heartbreaking record that is both a love letter to her younger self, and a defiant statement that home will always be where the heart is.
“Being back here makes me feel hot in the face” she sings on opening track ‘Hot & Heavy’, and the pungent imagery of her lyrics relay an all too familiar feeling. A stiff knot in the stomach, blushed cheeks and fidgeting fingertips as she steps foot into Virginia once again, no longer Lucy the girl next door, but Lucy who has begun to make a name for herself, Lucy who gets recognised in the street. “The night I got back I broke up with my partner and hadn’t been there for so long,” she reveals. “Life was really different immediately. My social circle was different and everybody's opinion of me was different because of starting to be noticed, and it just hit me that ‘you can never go home again’ is a really true phrase”.
Pouring through stacks of her old diaries indented with scribblings of her life, Lucy found a solace in her unabashed teenage honesty that played a crucial part in the writing process. “I didn't want to reread them until it felt right. If I remembered a specific thing, I'd go back into the journal and try to find how I wrote about it in the moment to help get more details or context, but I actually began to read them during quarantine for the first time ever and type them up. I got up to age 16 and was like that’s enough for now! I can wait a few more years to unlock the rest”.
One of the most candid offerings on ‘Home Video’ is a track called ‘Triple Dog Dare’. Perfectly painting the moments she discovered that her emotions for a close friend tip-toed between platonic or further, she contemplates what could have been had she embraced those feelings, and how the decision to cloak her attraction came from not fear, but instead confusion. “I think the main person I was hiding from was myself. I didn’t even realise that was how I felt, I just had these intense feelings and thought they were unique to the situation and not an indication of my sexuality or anything that would affect my identity. I do still wonder how much attraction actually factors into identity because I feel like attraction is just about the involved parties and you have a choice whether you want to incorporate that into your identity, but for a long time I didn't. Now I'm more willing to do that. It took many many years to feel comfortable doing that”.
A natural storyteller, Lucy’s love for books has transcended from her infant years to adulthood. Proudly exhibiting her vast collection neatly stored into organised bookshelves, from fiction to fact and cookery to witchcraft, the ability to soak into a world other than her own would often be more than inviting. Whilst ‘Home Video’ is a proposed shedding of skin for the singer-songwriter, her past two releases were less about thematics, and more of a somewhat accident. “No Burden’ I thought nobody would hear, and I didn’t make it intending for anyone to hear it other than our guitarist Jacob's professor as it was a school project for him, so it was a big surprise” she laughs”.
One might feel that an album that nods to home and childhood was as a result of Dacus looking for sanctuary and a safer space during the pandemic. As we read in the interview conducted with The Forty-Five, Home Video has been in the works for a couple of years:
“As easy as it would be to believe that this record of memories and reflection was a product of the pandemic, when ‘Home Video’ is released to everyone on June 25, it will be almost two years old: “The whole record was actually done and recorded before lockdown. Completely done. But I did double down in lockdown, looking into the past. I started typing up my old journals, starting at the top and reading which I had never done before. I like things that make me feel weird and the passage of time reliably makes me feel weird. So maybe there’s a chance that people will be able to relate now.”
She’s right to note a cultural appetite for revisiting the past to make sense of the future; a planet trying to hold onto muddled memories before they’re unceremoniously taped over. “I’ve been seeing a lot of people going back to the old detritus of their childhoods. That can be such a trippy experience,” she says. “Every time that you remember something, even neurologically, you’re kind of rewriting the memory. I heard somewhere that the people with the most pristine memories are people with dementia because they don’t actually recall the memories and technically, they’re the truest in their minds. I do a lot of remembering and I believe I get a lot of insight with distance but I also kind of wonder, ‘Am I getting farther from the truth by remembering so much?’”
PHOTO CREDIT: Natalie Piserchio for The Forty-Five
Growing up in Richmond also meant growing up under the suffocating shelter of the Church. “When you’re a kid, they teach you about lovely things like forgiveness and patience and self control. Love, kindness and gratitude. I don’t regret that part of my upbringing.” It couldn’t stay that way forever. When she went to high school, “literally every single sermon was like ‘don’t have sex’,” so when Church shifted, so did she. The impact of those formative years is unambiguous now (“We’re coming home from a sermon / saying how bent on evil we are”), but for a while, her entire life was Church. Dacus doesn’t really believe in God anymore – “that’s the short answer”– but her belief “didn’t go from something to nothing. It went from something to something bigger.”
Did that faith double as a comfort blanket? “Oh my God, yeah,” Dacus says, irony not lost. “A comfort blanket and a crutch and an identity and a shell to inhabit and a community and a family and a reason. It was everything.”
“I think that my friends are worth the world. It’s their choice to settle for less and I can’t change their minds but I see it as my job to remind them that they could do better by themselves. It’s not their job to teach someone how to be kind. I want their kindness to be celebrated instead of drained.”
Dacus’ sense of duty shines brightest on ‘Thumbs’ – the first single and darkest moment on the record that debuted as a VHS tape sent to a select few fans. She’s there for a friend when they visit their abusive father but can barely contain her own blind rage – “I love your eyes / and he has them” so Dacus imagines her thumbs on his irises “pressing in / until they burst”. The process of revisiting all that anger felt “physically bad as an emotion” but she also considered it “good to be connected to an aspect of the human experience and to be able to understand violence a little more.”
For much of her youth, Dacus was a pacifist, a stance she considers a privileged one in many ways – it’s easy to reject all forms of violence when you’re rarely in a position that calls for it – that was also shaped by her womanhood, having never been taught to embrace anger. “I don’t feel like female anger is taken seriously or it is taken so seriously that it is disempowered all the time. Whether it’s overt or not, it makes sense that women would be mad. For many reasons, it would be totally justified. So if men feel threatened, they know it might be for a good reason. Particularly in ‘Thumbs’, that man probably knew that he deserved his comeuppance and rage against him. I’m just thankful to my friend for inviting me into her life in that way”.
Before coming to reviews of Home Video, there is one more interview that interested me. The Line of Best Fit caught up Dacus. One of the most interesting segments from the interview is when she is asked about the lyrical themes behind a couple of tracks:
“A lot of the songs on Home Video were written and recorded before the pandemic. Do you find your understanding of the record has changed over the past 18 months? Have any tracks taken on new meaning?
I’m still finding out what the songs mean. I always think I know what they mean, and then something happens and I’m like, oh no, that’s actually what that’s about. I feel like I can never fully trust my own comprehension skills. “Cartwheel” I started writing in 2017, and even just as recently as a month ago – four years later – there’s a couple of lines in that that finally make sense.
On this record you explore religious themes on “VBS” and “Triple Dog Dare” – why do you think queer people are so drawn to religion in the art we make?
Religion sets you up to be a heteronormative person. I didn’t realise it was a barrier, but it was. If it wasn’t there, I probably would have come out to myself sooner. I really like people who are queer looking back at their religious experiences – I’m still doing that. I wrote these songs, but it doesn’t feel like it’s over. It doesn’t feel like I’ve fully been able to express to myself what these times meant. I’m just another step along the path of figuring that out.
“Triple Dog Dare” is about a relationship I had in high school, though I picture the characters in that song a little younger than that. My friend’s mother was Catholic and a psychic, and read my palm and told us we couldn’t hang out anymore. I think basically she saw what was going on before we did – saw there was romantic potential there and tried to keep us apart by any means possible.
In truth, that worked. We stopped being close friends, and it sucked. In the song, I wrote this alternate ending, where the characters leave their homes and run away together, and don’t listen to anybody. It felt good to write that for myself.
Recent single “Brando” reads as a very cutting riposte to toxic masculinity and the kind of poseur attitudes that so many men have towards both media and the women they date (or want to date). What was the inspiration for that song?
I didn’t really like “Brando” at first because it felt a little mean, and also a little cute – if those two things can coexist! I showed it to Colin [Pastore], Jacob [Blizard], and Jake [Finch], who I make records with, and they were like, this is the best one! This one’s just fun!
Having fun is really important, and you can say things that are honest in a playful way. I don’t think I’m being mean on that song, because I’m literally just saying stuff that happened. Maybe it’s a little mean to say “you’ll never be Brando,” but it’s also technically true. I was bothered by the fact that this person was trying to mould himself off of characters. That’s not even real, who are you? Why are you trying to be all these fake people, when there’s a real person that you could be getting to know in yourself – and also me! Why was he insisting that I be an accessory to his life, rather than a full-fledged person? Who’s to say.
Obviously you have worked a lot with Phoebe Bridgers and Julien Baker, the other boygenius members, over recent years, has working collaboratively influenced your style as a solo artist?
For sure! They feel really different, and they both feel great. I think that both benefit each other, because it takes the pressure off. I’ll write a song, sometimes, and be like, I don’t know if this is a me song, maybe it is a boygenius song. I don’t know if we’ll ever do that again, but I’ve been seeing things as having different places. I had a lot of fun writing with them, and I’ve been able to lasso that fun into the rest of my music.
From Phoebe and Julien, I understand that any idea that makes your eyes widen is a good idea, whether it’s funny, or dark, or anything. That feeling of intensity is something worth pursuing”.
To show the love that Home Video has received, there are two reviews that are worth exploring. As I said, the album is one of the very best of 2021. I am sure that Lucy Dacus is keen to get the album out to the people and see how the songs connect with her fans! This is what CLASH said in their review for Home Video:
“Bible camp boyfriends, sneaking out of the house, beautiful friendships, terrible friendships, closeted queerness – this is Lucy Dacus re-examining her adolescence and she’s not shying away from the sad bits.
'Home Video' is the 26-year-old American’s third solo album and it’s an emotional exploration of her youth. Her cutting lyrics combine the vividness of teenage experiences with Dacus’ adult reflections on them. "You called me cerebral and I didn’t know what you meant / But now I do, would it have killed you to call me pretty instead?" she sings in ‘Brando’, a bop about a bad friendship. Her language is often playfully subversive: the title of the brilliant opening track ‘Hot & Heavy’ is not just sexual innuendo but refers to the emotional impacts of revisiting memories; meanwhile the childishly innocent titles of ‘Cartwheel’ and ‘Triple Dog Dare’ contrast their melancholic lyrics and grown-up perspectives.
Dacus’s album sifts through memories corroborated by the journals she has kept since she was seven. Christianity is a recurring theme – "in the summer of ’07 I was sure I’d go to heaven" Dacus sings in the opening lines of ‘VBS’, an acronym for ‘vacation bible school’. In ‘Christine’ she sings of "a sermon saying how bent and evil we are". Although it was a large part of Dacus’ adolescence, she is not religious now. Sometimes things need to stay in the past, Dacus suggests in ‘Thumbs’, a heart-breaking song about meeting a friend’s estranged father.
Dacus’ talent for crafting emotionally devastating rock songs has been undeniable since she opened her 2018 album Historian with the incredible ‘Night Shift’, but there are also some surprises on the album. In ‘Partner in Crime’, a song about lying about her age to date an older man, Dacus uses autotune because she was recovering from a vocal injury at the time of recording. It works perfectly – the slight artificiality of her voice complements the song’s subject.
Other surprises include cameos from Dacus’ boygenius bandmates, Julien Baker and Phoebe Bridgers, as well as singer-songwriter Mitski. In addition to their backing vocals in ‘Please Stay’, her friends’ laughs and voices can be heard at the end of ‘Going Going Gone’, a delightful acoustic campfire-style song.
'Home Video' concludes with the intense ‘Please Stay’ followed by the anthemic eight-minute ‘Triple Dog Dare’ which is full of nostalgia, longing and innocence. It’s a powerful ending to a powerful album, confirming Home Video as another exquisite offering from Lucy Dacus”.
I am going to return to Home Video, as I have not listened to the album for a little while. I am interested in Lucy Dacus as a creative person. I feel she is a very compelling artist who is going to go on to be one of the greats. Home Video is the sound of an artist near the top of her game. SLANT reviewed her third studio album and offered up some interesting observations:
“Hot & Heavy,” for instance, toys with polyrhythms, featuring layered guitars that alternately sway and chug, its propulsive melody building steadily. “You used to be so sweet/Now you’re a firecracker on a crowded street,” Dacus belts, encapsulating the simultaneous discomfort and exhilaration tied to the memories she explores throughout the album.
Ultimately, it’s less the nuances of Dacus’s writing than her willingness to expose herself and her past so freely—even the most difficult parts—that make the strongest impression on Home Video. The spare, plaintive ballads pack just as much wallop as the rockers, as Dacus exposes the most vulnerable moments of her past, like when she grapples with unrequited love and a sudden maturity in the ambling “Cartwheel”: “When you told me ‘bout your first time/A soccer player at the senior high/I felt my body crumple to the floor/Betrayal like I’d never felt before.”
On the sweetly endearing “VBS,” Dacus looks back on meeting her first boyfriend at bible camp, reading his awful poetry, and taking an early stab at rebellion by snorting nutmeg with him. “While you’re going to sleep, your mind keeps you awake…Playing Slayer at full volume helps to drown it out,” she sings, just before a seconds-long blast of heavy, ultra-distorted guitar. It’s the kind of dorky nod that the teenage Dacus probably would’ve thought was cool, which is why its inclusion makes the song seem even more genuine.
Other songs delve into much thornier territory. “First Time” and “Triple Dog Dare” luridly tackle the stress of coming to terms with one’s adolescent sexuality while being raised Christian in the South. But they’re the epitome of politesse compared to the album centerpiece, “Thumbs.” Over nothing more than a low synth drone and a few whooshing sound effects, Dacus recounts an experience she had accompanying a friend to a bar to meet up with the latter’s deadbeat dad for the first time in years. “Honey, you sure look great/Do you get the checks I send on your birthday?” the dad asks flippantly as Dacus silently stews for her abandoned friend. “I would kill him if you let me,” she seethes with chilling stoicism. “I imagine my thumbs on the irises/Pressing in until they burst.”
It’s not easy to remain a sympathetic character once you’ve given a clinical explanation of how you plan to commit murder. “Thumbs” is the clearest distillation of why Dacus does, and it’s also what sets Home Video apart from standard confessional singer-songwriter fare, as the album isn’t actually about her. It’s about other people who have come and gone from her life and shaped her in the process, from old flames on “VBS” and “Going Going Gone,” to old friends on “Thumbs” and the disarmingly direct “Christine,” on which she mourns for a friend who stays in a safe relationship she knows won’t make her happy in the long run: “All in all nobody’s perfect/There may be better but you don’t feel worth it/That’s where we disagree.”
Even on “Brando,” written about someone whose pretentiousness and obsession with obsolescent pop culture drove him and Dacus apart, the song’s breeziness leaves the impression that she’s glad to have known him anyway. It takes profound empathy to write an entire album about your own past and have it turn out to be about your love for others instead”.
I shall end it there. Go and listen to Home Video if you have not discovered it. Follow Dacus on Twitter and keep an eye on a wonderful artist. Maybe she will release another solo album next; perhaps more work with boygenius. With excellent, near-career-best new albums from Bridgers (Punisher, 2020) and Julien Baker (Little Oblivions, 2021), there is no energy and creative flow in the group. Who knows! Lots of respect to the fantastic Lucy Dacus. She is truly…
A world-class talent.