Lucy Dacus is sat on the sofa in a baseball cap, jeans and a tee. It’s been a funny ol’ morning. It’s the week before the release of her fourth album, ‘Forever Is A Feeling’, a record of songs which unfuddles the complexities of desire and love through Dacus’ poetic indie. She’s in London to play a couple of intimate museum shows to mark the album’s launch. Yesterday, an article in The New Yorker revealed that the subject of her affection – and the new album – is her boygenius bandmate Julien Baker.
Boygenius – of course – are the three-piece supergroup consisting of Dacus, Baker and Phoebe Bridgers. It’s a side project for all three but one that saw them top the US charts and collect three Grammys for their astonishing first full-length album, ‘The Record‘ in 2022. In queer, indie circles, they are basically The Beatles. So for fans who have long since suspected/known that Dacus and Baker are an item, to get confirmation that their faves are a thing, is giddy-inducing news.
I ask if it’s been an intense morning on the internet. Dacus looks perplexed: “Oh, because of me and Julien being together?” she asks, “I try not to look. But friends have been sending me funny things. It’s a happy thing – and Julien is very pro me letting people know.”
It’s been a couple of years since Dacus has played live, and this small run of shows has eased her back into performance after the whirlwind that was touring ‘The Record’. There have been stops at L’eglise Saint-Eustache in Paris, The Huntington Library in Pasadena and tonight, The Foundling Museum in London. The former 1700s children’s home and hospital is the only museum to celebrate care-experienced people. Dacus was adopted as a child, and the choice of venue – though a happy accident (the previous museum got freaked out after so many fans called up begging for a ticket) – is significant. “I wish this existed when I was growing up”, she tells fans that night on stage. “Kids can be mean and it would have been cool for them to see that adoption is normal”.
The museum shows have been the first outing for much of ‘Forever Is A Feeling’. It’s a record written on the road around the time of touring with boygenius. It was then that Dacus realised her feelings for Baker. ‘Forever Is A Feeling’ is complex in its portrayal of love. The complicated nature of falling hard for your friend (and, well, colleague), sparking the kind of red-hot desire only really felt with something you can’t have (‘Ankles’) and a messiness that comes from there being other people involved (‘Limerance’). But mostly, it’s an album of love songs. One that acknowledges the impermanence of all things.
‘Reality should be a part of love,” Dacus says of the album’s titular sentiment. “Even when people use the word romanticising, the implication is that you’re not including reality in your romanticisation and that romance is false. But I’m like, no, romance can be true if the love is real and true and of itself.”
On second single, ‘Best Guess’, Dacus sings of someone being her hunch at a happy ending. “If I was a gambling man, and I am, you’d be my best bet”. It’s an almost pessimistic kind of love. One that feels all too relatable.
“There’s a lot of romance that is actually money,” she continues. “People exchange romance in order to get from each other what they want – it can be manipulative. And the same goes for professing love. Marriage, being from the heart is new. For so long, marriage was this thing that helped society. Basically, you have more kids and that is it. So this idea that you need, like, a soul mate is kind of new.”
‘Best Guess’ is the first time Dacus has used female pronouns for a partner in her songs, choosing ambiguity in the past, a hangover, perhaps, from her Christian upbringing. That wrestling with religion is also present across ‘Forever Is A Feeling’: “You may not be an angel, but you are my girl”, she sings on ‘Best Guess’. “If the devil is in the details, God is in the gap in your teeth“, on ‘For Keeps’.
Singing these queer love songs in the spaces she’s chosen on this limited tour, particularly the churches, has been a powerful experience. “Especially at a time when gay and trans rights are so threatened,” she notes. “Things are getting markedly worse really quickly, but then we have come so far because there are times in the past in a church when I would have been killed”.
Dacus grew up in Virginia and was deeply ingrained in the church until her late teens. Back in 2021, she told us that allowing religion to define her personality had set her back on her “self-discovery journey”. “At the time, I remember my whole goal was to be a body in God’s service… I actually wanted to be a husk for God’s will,” she joked. These days, she knows who she is and what makes her happy.
Now living in California, Dacus surrounds herself with like-minded people and musicians. But even in the relatively liberal bubble of East Los Angeles, it’s a frightening time to be an American. “I have many trans friends. People keep saying it’s just 1% of the global population but I feel like most of my friends are trans.”
Dacus spun her Rolodex of “Hot Mascs” for the ‘Best Guess’ video which features musician Towa Bird, actor E.R. Fightmaster and MUNA’s Naomi McPherson. She put out a TikTok casting call for anyone “suave” to fill the remaining spots. “I’m very blessed,” she says of her friendship pool. “But a lot of them are already getting their passports confiscated or have had them be quote unquote ‘corrected’. It’s really happening. Who knows what the end goals of these things are. It really emboldens people who are already hateful to be more vocal about it. The experience of everyday life feels more dangerous. Even just being a visible gay person, you become an outlet for people’s misguided hatred.”
If ‘Forever’ is truly just a feeling rather than a commitment made between two people, how does Dacus balance finding her person with a sense that everything is fleeting? “Whenever anything is precious to me, I’m like, I need to be ready to lose this at any time,” she admits. “I experience preemptive grief a lot. But I can never predict how the grief is going to settle – so it’s useless! But I think it’s just a healthier way to embark on loving someone than to say, ‘OK, sign this contract that says that we’re going to be the same forever.’ That’s not realistic. I would require for anyone who loves me to acknowledge that I’m going to change.”
I would require for anyone who loves me to acknowledge that I’m going to change
Lucy Dacus
It’s a hard task to balance writing about romance and reality without making it sound kinda depressing. But Dacus’ considered lyricism has a way of making the understated sound profound. Case in point, ‘Big Deal’. Following soaring, orchestral prelude, ‘Calliope’, the album’s second song is a near-perfect declaration of love. “But if we never talk about it again / there’s something that I want you to understand / you’re a Big Deal”. If teenagers everywhere aren’t sending this to their secret crush, they are doing something very wrong.
It was through tracks such as this, that Dacus first expressed to Baker how she felt. “The album was a gift to her first”, she says, smiling. “I wrote that song genuinely, when it was like, ‘OK, feelings are on the table, and we ought not touch them, because our relationship is too important, and I support what you want for your life. And how great that you’ve told me! Or like, ‘Wow, what a surprise that we’re saying this out loud. But let’s ultimately just say that we matter to each other and move on.’ That was real. That’s how I felt.”
I posit that it’s a rather intense way to communicate. “I guess with a lot of music that’s put out, the person is thinking about the album and their next move. For pop people, they’re making a product. I am not doing that”, Dacus says emphatically. “I am writing the songs so I can send them to people or so I can hear them myself. It’s shocking to me that I choose to do this publicly!”
As much as the album was intended as a gift to Baker, it’s as much of a gift to fans; a time capsule that serves as a companion piece to ‘The Record’, allowing listeners to peek behind the curtain, joining the dots between the songs. “In a way, that’s the bit that makes me feel uncomfortable,” Dacus admits, “The lore of it all – people treating our lives like a Marvel Universe. “But then again, what is lore if not the story? Some parts of my story I keep for myself but this is the story that defines my life. So what am I gonna do?”
‘Buy ‘Forever Is A Feeling‘ on vinyl’
