Lucy Dacus Captures Memory On A Musical Home Video

By Max Freedman


We so often think of music as a free-flowing expression of one’s innermost emotions — yearning, love, grief, dismay — that it’s jolting to hear Lucy Dacus speak about it as roughly the opposite. “There are a lot more facts in this,” the Richmond, Virginia-based 26-year-old says of her third album, Home Video, a variety of crystal-clear, folk-inflected rock songs with lyrics that match the music’s lucidity. Not that she’s out here burying intelligence in music. As an alternative, she’s recounting old memories without filter and turning them into songs, an attempt “to make sort out of something… [and] assert control over my perception of myself.” In that regard, Home Video is a smashing success: It puts Dacus’s teenage and early-twenties experiences on the page more clearly than anything she’s done before.


Every song on Home Video, Dacus tells MTV News while in a mid-afternoon Zoom chat, “is about someone specific. There’s an actual name and face in back of it.” By contrast, on her 2016 debut No Burden and 2018 sophomore LP Historian, she “was making an effort...To write things that were really general.” Those albums earned her a reputation as a leading voice in a new generation of lyrically deft rock musicians — in 2018, the New York Times called her a “star.” The praise dovetailed with an onslaught of touring, first in back of Historian and then around her ceaselessly buzzed-about EP with Boygenius, her trio with contemporaries and dear companions Julien Baker and Phoebe Bridgers. The acclaim, success, and travels were wonderful, nevertheless the disadvantages of the latter partially led to the sharpened verse that dominates Home Video.


“Touring a lot and being away from Richmond really shook my identity,” Dacus says, “because I noticed a lot of myself in my hometown and being involved in the music community there. I felt this urge to reexamine [my] past to get back to some core element of who I am. Occasionally, I'll get the sense that a past version of myself holds more weight than who I am now.”


Of course, the Boygenius tour wasn’t all bad, so you could hear one of its biggest upsides inside of the opening seconds of Home Video. Warm synths gradually introduce the gleaming, Springsteen-esque opener “Hot & Heavy.” “Being in a musical group with Phoebe and Julien changed how I write,” Dacus says. “I felt like it gave me more access to myself, and I realized I had all these rules about what I may and couldn't [do] for no reason.” On No Burden and Historian, she contained firmly to those rules, which included a total ban on pianos, synths, and acoustic guitars — which all play a substantial, intentional role on Home Video. They’re a welcome addition: Even if Dacus insists that Home Video “technically [has] some heavier topics than before,” her music has never sounded lighter and freer. This looseness persists whether Dacus’s crystal-clear recollections are enlightening, revitalizing, crushing, or all the above.


Home Video often sounds like a close friend unburdening herself of a formative teenage or early college memory in full detail. With Dacus’s expanded, freer sonic palette, she needs only droning synths to ground a story: On “Thumbs,” she tells of remaining physically present with someone going by way of the unthinkably terrifying experience of seeing their emotionally abusive father for the initial time in ages (“I would kill him in case you let me” is a balm, not a threat). If she mentally revisits an old friend stuck in a relationship that fit neither their emotional needs nor their sexuality, she does so not amid her longtime melancholy, bluesy rock nevertheless alternatively twinkling pianos and acoustic guitars (“Christine”). In both cases — and while in the album — Dacus paints her experiences in so much detail that you may as well be right next to her. You could practically smell the nutmeg the teenage antihero of “VBS” snorts in his bunk bed (an event Dacus says is, yes, a fact).


It’s close to impossible to describe Home Video without naming things Dacus has actually experienced, and that’s exactly the point. The collection showcases her far less as a songwriter than a storyteller with a novelist’s pen, an empath with a photographic memory. Her habit of telling it like it is comes from her upbringing. As she discusses the “hundreds of hours of house videos that my dad took of me any time As soon as I was younger,” she says that this footage evokes “the power [of] looking at something and documenting it.”


That’s a large piece of why Dacus chose to title the album Home Video. “[My dad] was making sense of his surroundings by framing it and cutting out everything else,” she says, “and that is a creative impulse I've shared with him...Focusing on one thing will assist you understand everything else.” Dacus also says she feels the same about watching these tapes as writing her songs: “I come out of these knowing more than I did before and feeling like I have power over my own thoughts.”


However Dacus doesn’t record clips herself, she says she’s “carrying on this construction of memory that my dad started. I may be writing a song about a bad relationship…or a friend in high school that I have elaborate feelings about, nevertheless it's still stuff I want to remember, and stuff that I'll remember because I learned from it. It shaped me.” Later, talking about something else entirely, Dacus says something that feels tied to this mindset. “I get a higher class of understanding of my life any time As soon as I revisit things every couple of years,” she says. “I increase a lot of wisdom from realizing how much I didn't realize previously.”


Near Home Video’s end, Dacus sounds closer than ever to understanding who she’s previously been, what she’s been through, and why that’s all made her who she is today. On “Brando,” amid high-strung acoustic guitars that sound like ferns suddenly bursting from a long-budding stem, Dacus is entirely aware that she’s far superior to what an old love interest thought of her. “You called me cerebral,” she recalls before asking with a healthy dose of humor, “Would it have killed you to call me pretty instead?” The chorus hinges on the declaration that “you never knew me like you thought you did,” as though Dacus — at least so far — does know herself. And more importantly, she has no time for people who can’t visualize in herself what she does.


Two tracks later, as Dacus sings “I’m not tired although / We still got a lot to figure out” at the outset of closer “Triple Dog Dare,” she generally seems to acknowledge that this whole self-reckoning thing is an endless cycle. No matter how close you come to knowing your true self, you could habitually get closer — what matters is that you’re using the past to inform the future. “I was looking for something Capital-T True about myself,” Dacus says, “and I don't have the feeling that I noticed it. But,” she adds confidently, “I do feel good about the process.”