Lucy Dacus, Historian
The rising singer-songwriter has a knack for clever turns of phrase and a big fan in D.C. (No, not him.)Lucy Dacus, Historian
The rising singer-songwriter has a knack for clever turns of phrase and a big fan in D.C. (No, not him.)
By her own admission, Lucy Dacus loves a good verbal tussle. The Richmond singer-songwriter had one recently with her buddy Colin Elmore, who plays in the Nashville band Colin Elmore & the Danville Train; Dacus admitted to him that she had never listened to a Rolling Stones album all the way through, and Elmore, offended, just couldn’t believe it. As she remembers, “He was like, ‘What?! You have to do this! You’re a musician! You owe it to your roots!’”
Dacus retorted, “Didn’t they rip off all the blues masters? What roots are you talking about?”
Recalling this friendly argument to me one afternoon in late January, Dacus shrugs. “Maybe one day I’m going to love the Rolling Stones, but I don’t like feeling like I have to do anything to validate my status as a musician, or a creative person, or a person.” She smiles. “But, I mean, it was fun to fight.”
Dacus and I are sitting in the swank lobby of the Roxy Hotel in Tribeca—her publicist’s choice, not her own, much to her relief. “Usually New York starts to make me tense up, and I lose my neck, my shoulders get really close to my ears,” Dacus, 22, says. “But it feels good to be dragged around, not having to make decisions.” A curated, unobtrusively quiet playlist of rock music wafts above us including, incidentally, Exile on Main St.’s “Tumbling Dice.” Sitting on a leather couch, she’s the Lucy Dacus version of dressed up: a crisp white shirt under a blazer, jeans, and bold red lipstick. When I spill some of my beverage, she jumps to instinctively wipe it up with her sleeve, before suddenly pulling back when she remembers that she’s wearing something uncharacteristically fancy. She speaks in warm, colorful phrases: a kind acquaintance is “a total peach,” her swear-word of choice seems to be “darnit.” But as unassuming as Dacus is, there’s also a pervasive confidence about her, a relaxed self-acceptance, one that makes me believe she’d have no trouble standing her ground in—and probably winning—an argument about the Rolling Stones.
Dacus released her first album, No Burden, in February 2016. It kicks off with the witty lament “I Don’t Wanna Be Funny Anymore,” which Rolling Stone called the 17th best song of that year—not bad for a then-20-year-old indie rocker’s debut single. As the title suggests, it’s wryly comic, but there’s a subtle melancholy about it, too: It is a song about not wanting the world to reduce you to a single identity, about wanting to be anyone but who you are outwardly perceived to be. It is alive with clever turns of phrase, but it’s also weighted with the knowledge that these identities are even more limited for women, especially in the music world. “I got a too-short skirt, maybe I can be the cute one,” Dacus sings in her low, hazy croon, with comedic eagerness. “Is there room in the band? I don’t need to be the frontman / If not, then I’ll be the biggest fan.”
No Burden turned heads, but her stunning sophomore album, Historian (out March 2 on Matador Records) establishes Dacus as one of the sharpest new indie songwriters to appear in some time. For the title, Dacus chose a word that she felt had enough wiggle-room in it to contain all the contradictions and complexities of her personality, as well as the strange skill she’s been able to translate into a full-time job. “I document people and try to capture them in all these different ways,” she says. “And then when they’re gone, I’m going to have all these little emblems of who they are.”
“It’ll say, ‘Lucy Dacus, comma, Historian, the way it would say, ‘John Doe, Dentist,’ you know? Like on a name plaque. Because if I had to encapsulate all of my creative identity in a word, it would be ‘historian’ before it would be ‘musician,’ or ‘writer,’ or anything.”
Lucy Dacus, Historian. Get the business cards ready.
About a year and a half ago, back in those simpler times, Virginia Senator and Democratic VP nominee Tim Kaine shared a Spotify playlist called “Tim’s Favorite Songs.” Alongside predictable fare like Bruce Springsteen, Stevie Wonder, and Bob Dylan, there was Lucy Dacus. When I first saw “I Don’t Wanna Be Funny Anymore” on Tim Kaine’s playlist, I assumed he was merely repping a local artist from his home state. When I ask Dacus about it, she has an even better explanation. “Oh, he’s my friend’s dad,” she says. “I went to kindergarten with [his daughter Annella] and we’ve been friends for a long time. He used to make us quiche in the morning after sleepovers, and stuff.”
“Can I tell you something funny about Tim Kaine?” Dacus then asks me, as though she has not already done just that. Yes, I say.
“His favorite movie is Citizen … Kane. And he does get the pun involved in that.” (Tim Kaine, who seems from these two small anecdotes to be everything I imagine him to be, did not respond to my request for comment.)
Even if it didn’t result in one of her childhood friends relocating to the White House, the 2016 election—and, more importantly, the wave of resistance that followed—was a personal reckoning for Dacus. This perspective is most present on one of Historian’s best songs, “Yours & Mine,” which she was inspired to write after participating in the 2017 Women’s March in Washington, D.C. “For those of you who told me I should stay indoors,” she sings, “Take care of you and yours / But me and mine, we’ve got a long way to go.” There’s a grit to the way she delivers those lines; the ones that follow are a more wistful survey of what’s been lost: “Because this ain’t my home anymore. This ain’t my home.”
Dacus grew up in Richmond, and though her mom is an elementary school music teacher, she (nor anyone in her family) never imagined she’d make a living as a musician. She taught herself guitar in middle school, in alternate tunings and made-up chords: “I would kind of hum and then [hums a melody] find it somewhere [on the guitar] and make chords out of that.” She still has no aspiration to be, as she calls it, “a guitar lord.”
“I have never felt welcome in the guitar realm,” she says. “It’s not just that it’s unwelcoming in terms of gender, but in terms of trivia. Pedal-heads or gearheads in general—it takes money to collect all of that. It feels like there’s so many gatekeeping facets to being a guitar lord.”
The reason she taught herself to play was more social than anything. “I started playing guitar because I just wanted to be that guy, you know?” she says. “And I totally was. Freshman year of high school, I’d bring my acoustic guitar and play in the hallway. I just wanted to make friends and, I mean, it kind of worked.” Like a pied piper of the high-school hallways, Dacus eventually attracted a group of like-minded music enthusiasts, some of whom she still works with to this day, like her producer Collin Pastore and bandmate Jacob Blizard.
Dacus doesn’t plan on leaving Richmond anytime soon; she recently bought a small house in a historic part of the city. Dacus has found living in what used to be the capital of the Confederacy to be surreal, especially of late. “[Richmond] is the beginning of the South geographically, but it’s also more Southern than some Southern states because it was the capital of the Confederacy. So there’s so much tension because there’s a lot of liberal people in the city, and then a lot of conservative people just outside the city, and some within it. But there are so many Confederate statues. … There’s gotta be something we can do for people who are uncomfortable every day of their lives just looking at them.” In the meantime, she has kept up a small personal tradition: “I flick them off whenever I pass by.” (When we met in New York, she told me that earlier in the day she’d walked past the Trump Hotel and given it “the double-bird.”)
Dacus is still in the stage of her career where she’s building an audience, but when I ask whether she’s ever worried about alienating potential fans with her politics, she brushes it off. “No. And I think that’s because I have made myself clear from the beginning, and so people who would be bothered by that just aren’t fans. Maybe I’ll make less fans in the long run, but I’m not trying to fool anybody about what I think, and I’m not trying to win fans by silencing myself. That seems horrible.”
Dacus writes with the beckoning brevity of a skilled short-story writer. She has a way with opening lines in particular: She knows how to set a droll, vivid scene that makes you lean in a little closer to the speaker, so you don’t miss a syllable of what happens next. Consider the first words on Historian, from the opener “Night Shift”:
The first time I tasted somebody else’s spit
I had a coughing fit
I mistakenly called them by your name
I was let down
It wasn’t the same
Dacus started playing the song live before she recorded it, and sometimes people would laugh at the first line—only to draw a sudden breath at the one that followed. “I have mixed feelings when people laugh,” she says, “because some days I’m like, ‘Yeah, it’s funny,’ and other days I’m like, ‘You don’t even know yet.’”
Early in our conversation, I told Dacus that I find her songs to be very emotionally complex, that even her “sad” songs are much more than just sad. “That puts me at ease,” she sighs. “Because I feel like people are just like, ‘Yeah, it’s dark and sad.’ And I think, ‘But it’s not all sad, right? Isn’t there some hope?’ I wouldn’t want it to be only sad. I feel like I would fail people if it came out only sad.”
Perhaps the greatest achievement on Historian is the penultimate track, “Pillar of Truth,” which Dacus wrote while visiting her Southern Baptist grandmother on her deathbed. “Pillar of Truth” is sad, yes, but it’s so many other things, too: anxious, tender, witty, scared, and ultimately transcendent. It also gradually builds to become one of Dacus’s loudest songs, creating a vibe that she describes (as a tribute to her Southern Baptist grandma) as “distorted gospel-choir,” raging guitars and triumphal horns competing to be heard over Dacus’s soulful yelps. “Occasionally we were like, Is this too much? And it’s like, no,” she laughs. “But I think it’s the whole vibe of this record, that the emotion I associate with distortion is present throughout the whole thing.”
I get why Dacus would balk at the “sad songwriter” label: It’s as limiting and one-dimensional as the identity she rebelled against on “I Don’t Wanna Be Funny Anymore.” Historian shows off Dacus’s range—which means that she can still be pretty funny, when she wants to.
“Whenever I’m writing I feel like there’s another entity there [other] than me,” she says as she nears the bottom of her cup of tea. “So I occasionally make myself laugh. I’ll write something and be like, ‘Ha!’ Or, ‘Oh, is that what I think? Who would have said it that way? Me?!’”