Lucy Dacus And The Difficult Third Album

The Story So Far

Lucy Dacus knows only one mode: intense. Her breakthrough album, No Burden, grappled with the insidious feelings of inadequacy that plagued her teenage years, including her struggles to make friends and her nagging feeling that the friends she had saw her only as a burden.

Five years later, Dacus has risen to fame in dramatic fashion, with a hugely lauded second album, tours with Bright Eyes and Lana Del Ray, and of course the formation of indie supergroup Boygenius with fellow critical darlings Julien Baker and Phoebe Bridgers. Historians, Dacus’ second outing, moved away from the teenage angst of her debut, instead exploring love and loss more broadly, through the lens first of the ending of a relationship, and later through the loss of a loved one.

Dacus described Historians, aptly named due to the way it grapples with time, and how we choose to deal with the changing events of our lives, as ‘the album I needed to make’, and remarked ‘everything after is just a bonus’. Now listening to what ‘everything after’ sounds like, one can’t help but reflect that this statement seems sadly accurate.

The Positives

This is not to say that Home Video doesn’t contain some serious high points.

‘Hot and Heavy’, the album’s opener, serves as a kind of mission statement for the record as a whole, opening with the line ‘being back here makes me hot in the face’, which, though directly referring to Dacus’ hometown (Richmond, VA) feels to the listener like greeting the person Dacus was while writing No Burden, and reliving the painful insecurity of that time. The true subject matter of ‘Hot and Heavy’, however, is, much like The Beatles’ ‘In My Life’, how places, so often, serve remind you of the people with which you experienced them. In the case of Richmond, this, for Dacus, is a string of ex-lovers and former crushes. ‘Hot and Heavy’ introduces us to the first.

Musically, ‘Hot and Heavy’ has lessons for the rest of the album. The pulse of the song is what drives its listenability, moving between percussive rhythms in a way that reflects the nature of the relationship the song revisits. The bulk of the track is fast and punchy, and it uses returns to the half-time beat of its intro as a way to punctuate its structure, going so far as to break directly on the word ‘start’ each time the chorus comes around again (not dissimilar, as it happens, to another Beatles track: ‘We Can Work It Out’).

‘First Time’, Home Video’s strongest rock tune, also owes a debt of gratitude to its percussive elements. The drum and synth pairing on this track is very reminiscent of another diamond on a recent slightly rough album: ‘Can’t Cool Me Down’ from Car Seat Headrest’s underwhelming 2020 release Leaving A Door Less Open. The percussion gives ‘First Time’ a real urgency that matches the lyrics extremely effectively, and the synth ebbs and flows in a way that gives the whole track a sense of the calming unreality of a vivid memory.

Thumbs: Worth The Hype?

‘Thumbs’, Home Video’s lead single, had so much buzz surrounding its release that a Twitter account was even started simply called ‘Has Lucy released Thumbs yet?’ Well, she has now, and it’s…fine.

That is to say, the song itself is an astounding piece of lyrical and melodic songcraft. Chronicling an outing with a friend and their estranged father, Dacus fantasises about getting revenge on the man for the hurt he has caused, and (CW for graphic imagery) gouging his eyes out, because ‘I love your eyes/ and he has them’.

Sadly, the way in which it has been arranged leaves much to be desired. The lessons of ‘Hot and Heavy’ and ‘First Time’ are that this album is strongest when it leans into the beat, and plays to Dacus’ strengths of soaring guitars and understated vocals. By attempted to completely centre the lyrical content of ‘Thumbs’ the song starts to drag a little toward its mid-section, and one finds themselves begging for some kind of musical or rhythmic development. There is no guitar here, just the soft drone of an organ, something that works for the first verse, but hugely outstays its welcome. Said guitar, and rhythmic development, never arrives, and you are left feeling just a little cheated that such a plainly excellent and powerful song was given so little to show off its obvious merits.

Perhaps the obvious comparison for ‘Thumbs’ from Dacus’ previous album is the equally anticipated ‘Night Shift’. Like ‘Thumbs’, ‘Night Shift’ recounts, in part, a meeting with an estranged familiar- in this case, Dacus’ ex-boyfriend. Rather than dealing with Dacus’ empathy towards a friend, ‘Night Shift’  is thus able to delve more into the singers own feelings, towards the situation, the relationship, and how she wants to move forward; in this instance, she sings ‘I’ll never see you again/ if I can help it.’ The violence of ‘Thumbs’ is replaced in ‘Night Shift’ by a more personal regret and frustration, less towards the ex-boyfriend, and more towards Dacus’ own inability to move on.

The internal nature of this emotion allows Dacus to more easily channel it into the songwriting, and ‘Night Shift’ culminates in a soaring crescendo of distorted guitar and vocals, giving the listener a real sense of what she is going through. The distance from the emotion that Dacus has in ‘Thumbs’ however, means that our third degree of separation is just one too many, and we are not permitted that same intimacy.

Further Analysis

One issue that plagues many of the tracks on Home Video is a lack of direction. It’s an old songwriting adage that the first thing you write should always be the chorus, as that generally winds up being the strongest section of the song. Whilst I don’t think this applies universally, it’s certainly advice that Dacus could have used once or twice, as strong initial verses repeatedly peter out into weak choruses and half-hearted conclusions.

This most noticeably effects Home Video’s second single ‘VBS’, a romping tune recounting the highs and lows of Dacus’ experiences at ‘Vacation Bible School’. Much like the song’s subject, this track contains highs and lows- it starts extremely strong, but loses itself somewhere in its domino-like rhyming couplets and charging melody.

The chorus of this song doesn’t make itself immediately known; the tune change is a subtle one, and it only becomes apparent as a chorus upon the swift return to the second verse’s more familiar sonic territory. When it comes around again, you’re left expecting another, more definite break from the main themes of the song, but, as with ‘Thumbs’, it never comes; the song just ends with a repeat of the chorus’ anticlimactic final line ‘dark feel darker than before’.

Home Video’s soundest attempt at a radio pop song is undoubtedly ‘Brando’. A straightforward love story, Dacus recounts the courtship, and their vaguely eccentric shared interests of old movies, Tennessee Williams, and old Tennessee Williams movies. The melody of the verse is sharp and catchy, and there are some smart lyrics too:

‘You called me cerebral
I didn't know what you meant
But now I do, would it have killed you
To call me pretty instead?’

However, once again, the chorus and progression let the song down. As soon as the familiar four-chord structure that has plagued popular music for the last fifty years rears its ugly head, the power of the song’s narrative is diminished, as is the assertion in the chorus’ lyrics that ‘you never knew me like you thought you did.’

This, frustratingly, is followed in the third verse by some of the finest, most complex lyricism on the whole album, with some disturbing revelations about the nature and detail of the relationship moulded into the subtext. It’s too late though, and a double chorus marks the song’s all-too-swift end, again giving the impression that the track has, much like the relationship it describes, lost its way.

The Best Track

In the interest of ending on a high note I won’t dedicate too much energy to the obvious misstep ‘Partners In Crime’ (short version: autotune was best left in the noughties). Instead, I’d like to talk about the Joni Mitchell-inspired campfire ballad ‘Going Going Gone’, which is the album’s best song. Dacus is an incredible songwriter, and allowing her this acoustic moment in a very busy and often confused album (indeed, this song leads directly into Partners In Crime, highlighting its strength) is a stroke of genius.

The song itself is a narrative in leaps, beginning with a teenage romance, stopping off to wax lyrical about the passage of time, and then tuning into the narrative after its players have grown. In this case, the male character in said romance grows into a boisterous, aggressive young adult, and then a cautious parent, informed by the experience of his youth:

‘Daniel in ten years
Grabbing a*ses, spilling beers
Another ten and he'll have a daughter
She'll grow up and he can't stop her’

Dacus then loops this back to their childhood courtship, and her dad’s assertion that she ‘always had to be home by eight’. As Joni Mitchell herself wrote: ‘We’re captive on the carousel of time’.

‘Going Going Gone’ is a short and perfectly formed folk tune that knows what it’s about, what its trying to do and where it’s going. Each of its achingly catchy, sing-along choruses allow themselves a change of exactly one word (‘going out’, ‘going down’, ‘going now’ and finally, ‘going gone’), and this function progresses the song neatly and effectively.

'Going Going Gone' is also the only track to add some meta-text on its end, in the form of a snippet of post-recording banter from Lucy and her friends who sing on the track. It’s sweet, they all clearly had fun, and, most of all, it feels earned.

Clearly having not quite shaken the needy anxiety of No Burden, Dacus says ‘I owe y’all whatever you ask me for the rest of my life.’ If this is to be taken as directed at her fans more broadly; well, Lucy, since you’re asking: more of this, please. More of this.

Home Video is available to stream now on all platforms. All information regarding Lucy Dacus' upcoming tours in Europe and North America is available on www.lucydacus.com.