I was sceptical about Lucy Dacus’s new album at first.
A love album. Lucy Dacus isn’t usually the artist I go to when I crave a love song (it’s always been Taylor Swift or Bleachers for me). It’s not that I don’t like a love song. I’d go as far as to say that I love a love song. But one of my favourite things about Lucy Dacus’s music is the fact that it isn’t all about romantic relationships or love, at least in the typical way that most music is. It feels like everything is written about love, sometimes (though, if you read my diary, you’d probably say the same thing).
I’ve never felt more seen in lyrics than I have with Lucy Dacus (although Japanese Breakfast comes frighteningly close), and I think that it is purely because Dacus writes about the things she is passionate about, whether or not they are palatable to a large audience, which results in songs that are at once intensely specific and ambiguous. Thumbs, an intensely personal song about meeting the absent father of someone Dacus loves and the violence this evokes (‘I imagine my thumbs on the irises/ Pressing in until they burst’) somehow manages to feel like a universal experience. I know every word of most of her songs, and still couldn’t tell you what most of them are about; some of my favourite songs ever, Addictions, or Map on a Wall, are both so personal and so vague that I could listen to them over and over and still find a new meaning each time. So many of her songs are amorphous in a wonderful way, especially those in her debut album, No Burden. Oddly, I think that it is sometimes the most personal, intensely specific works that in turn become the most self-applicable (as is the case with poetry, too).
It can be very difficult, sometimes, to not know details about the personal life of a singer or celebrity that you like: you want to both be able to read interviews, watch live performances, attend concerts, and follow their social media without actually discovering too much about them, for fear of it diminishing their relatability. In the same manner as Youtubers like Emma Chamberlain, who make base their brand on being relatable and end up struggling to make the same content once their life is no longer ‘relatable’ to most viewers, I think that the idea of knowing everything about the life of an artist taints the music slightly (on a separate level, this largely contributed to my lack of enthusiasm for the much too specific album The Tortured Poets Department, which essentially required listeners to know details of Swift’s life for it to be wholly comprehensible).
It’s the eternal paradox: wanting your favourite artists to live happily and have fans and money, whilst simultaneously harbouring the selfish urge to keep them to all yourself. This crosses my mind anytime I have to queue hours in advance for a concert. (Why can’t we be more laid back about these people we admire? I ask, as I wait 3 hours in the sun for a Boygenius concert. Has no-one here listened to Bite the Hand?)
However, everything I read or learn about Lucy Dacus only makes me fonder. For me, she’s one of the rare celebrities who I imagine to be exactly the same in person as they appear in their writing or online. She at once is open about wanting recognition for her musical talents (‘I don’t wanna be that man on a train/ On a grey commute, imagining fame’) and indicates a separation between character and celebrity (‘But you will never be famous to me’). When listening to her music, I don’t get the sense that she’s doing it for fame, but for enjoyment, and that is what is reflected to me in the honest, open tone of her lyrics.
I think I do agree, sometimes, that everything is about love. Not just romantic love, but platonic, familial love, too. But it doesn’t mean that it’s all there is. I want to hear about everything in music, specific emotions and moments and glances. I want to hear about things that make people mad or unhappy or overjoyed that aren’t intrinsically tied to the feelings or desires of another person. I want to hear about random events and flickering feelings, small sections of life that we wouldn’t hear about otherwise. It’s in these odd snippets that we find ourselves, our deepest emotions, a sound that resonates.
I often think about this quote from Richard Price: ‘The bigger the issue, the smaller you write. Remember that. You don’t write about the horrors of war. No. You write about a kid’s burnt socks lying on the road. You pick the smallest manageable part of the big thing, and you work off the resonance’.
I’m awful at following what I claim is some of the best writing advice out there: I agree with the idea wholeheartedly, yet I always think that this poem, this article, this sentence will be the one that allows me to understand this huge concept that has never adequately been summarised. The last article I went to write began with a desire to understand desire itself: I read a lot of Marguerite Duras last term, and she has this common thread running throughout all of her works, labelled beautifully by a lecturer I had as ‘a quest to express the inexpressible’. I think about it all the time. It’s in itself paradoxical: her whole oeuvre is an attempt to put in writing the things that cannot be written about. So of course, it’s impossible to ever express. But she still tries, because that is all that you can do – come as close as you can to the subject to try to understand it, by writing about the small things that help you to ‘work off the resonance’. I think that Lucy Dacus does this wonderfully.
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‘When you’re writing, you’re trying to find out something which you don’t know. The whole language of writing for me is finding out what you don’t want to know, what you don’t want to find out. But something forces you to anyway.’
— James Baldwin, The Writer’s Chapbook: A Compendium of Fact, Opinion, Wit, and Advice from the 20th Century’s Preeminent Writers
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Her work isn’t openly about big topics, like love or a breakup or unhappiness; it starts with something small, a uniquely drawn out image like ‘Freeze frame, tidal wave, in the passenger side’, or ‘You’re falling asleep on my shoulder in the back of your boyfriend’s car’, and progresses into a universal feeling – ‘I’m just calling ‘cos I’m used to it, and you’ll pick up ‘cos you’re not a quitter’; ‘If you get married, I’ll object’. In an interview for her new album, Dacus stated, ‘I think I often write about things I don’t understand’. Maybe this, like with Duras, Price, Baldwin, is the reason why her lyrics feel as though they are creating something new, something at once personal and collective.
I realised, after listening to the new album Forever is a Feeling, something that I should’ve foreseen: even an album about love, something I think I hear too much about, sometimes, is made unique at the hands of Lucy Dacus. If anything, it’s polished off her discography nicely: who needs other artists when you already have one who writes about love, hate, ambition, loneliness, and everything in-between?