{"id":838758,"date":"2025-04-03T16:12:23","date_gmt":"2025-04-03T21:12:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/2025\/04\/03\/the-subversive-love-songs-of-lucy-dacus\/"},"modified":"2025-04-03T16:12:23","modified_gmt":"2025-04-03T21:12:23","slug":"the-subversive-love-songs-of-lucy-dacus","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/2025\/04\/03\/the-subversive-love-songs-of-lucy-dacus\/","title":{"rendered":"The Subversive Love Songs of Lucy Dacus"},"content":{"rendered":"
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One morning in January, I met the musician Lucy Dacus at the Cloisters, the medieval-art museum at the northwestern tip of Manhattan, overlooking the Hudson River. Dacus is a formidable solo artist\u2014since 2016, she has released three albums of searching, intimate folk rock\u2014but she\u2019s perhaps best known as one-third of the indie supergroup boygenius, alongside Phoebe Bridgers and Julien Baker. Although boygenius formed in 2018, and put out an eponymous EP that year, the release of its d\u00e9but full-length, \u201cThe Record,\u201d in 2023, was a seismic event: it garnered seven Grammy nominations and three wins, and earned the band a slot on a Timoth\u00e9e Chalamet-hosted episode of \u201cSaturday Night Live,\u201d a sold-out show at Madison Square Garden, and a Rolling Stone<\/em> cover mimicking a portrait of Nirvana, in which the boys, as they are known, appear wearing Gucci power suits and wide ties, arms defensively crossed. For Americans exhausted by the long tail of the first Trump Presidency, with its suffocating ideas about identity (all three members of boygenius are queer), the band became a kind of generational loadstone, a flash of hope in an era defined by catastrophic backsliding. The boys made out onstage, ripped their shirts open, covered Shania Twain, soloed, dressed as the Holy Trinity, free-bled, and leaped into one another\u2019s arms. The band offered a new and liberating portrayal of female friendship, along with a lesson in liberation more generally.<\/p>\n

This spring, Dacus, who is twenty-nine, will release \u201cForever Is a Feeling,\u201d her fourth solo record. It\u2019s a gorgeous and tender album about falling in love\u2014Dacus is now in a committed relationship with Baker\u2014and how the tumult of that experience has forced her to reckon with the unknown. \u201cThis is bliss\u00a0\/ This is Hell\u00a0\/\u00a0Forever is a feeling\u00a0\/\u00a0and I know it well,\u201d Dacus sings on the title track. Her voice sounds pure and soft over a tangle of synthesizers, gamelan, harp, and drum machine. Dacus described the album as being partly about the idea of \u201ccoming to terms with change\u2014of knowing that things aren\u2019t forever,\u201d and of finding freedom in the various ways we are asked, relentlessly and repeatedly, to reimagine ourselves and our lives.<\/p>\n

Dacus and I met near the museum\u2019s front entrance. The sky was gray and sagging; the Hudson was chunky with ice. When I arrived, Dacus was reading a copy of Vladimir Nabokov\u2019s \u201cPale Fire,\u201d from 1962, a novel that takes the form of a nine-hundred-and-ninety-nine-line poem, written by a fictional author named John Shade, with commentary by Charles Kinbote, a deranged and largely unbearable academic. (Kinbote could probably be thought of as a punisher, to borrow the title of Bridgers\u2019s second record\u2014a person who simply does not know when to zip it.) Dacus was into it. \u201cHe knows how to write insufferable people,\u201d she said. Dacus is frequently described as statuesque\u2014she is five feet ten inches, with icy blue-green eyes, and she exudes a kind of quiet, serene elegance that feels of another century. The cover of \u201cForever Is a Feeling\u201d features an oil painting of her, done by the artist Will St. John, who is known for his portraits of drag queens and antique porcelain dolls. Dacus is pictured mostly nude, draped in gold cloth and glowing. Toward the bottom, there\u2019s a strange and tiny figure in a dark cloak, walking. \u201cThat was left over from some other painting,\u201d Dacus said. \u201cI think he was planning to get rid of it. But I like him. He reminds me of the Fool in the tarot deck. He\u2019s just starting out on a journey.\u201d<\/p>\n

The museum is made up of four cloisters\u2014covered walkways flanked on one side by a colonnade\u2014which were acquired in the early nineteen-hundreds by the sculptor George Grey Barnard, who collected architectural fragments from abbeys and churches built by monastic orders in the twelfth century. Barnard was famously unskilled when it came to managing his money, and, in 1925, he had to sell the cloisters to John\u00a0D. Rockefeller,\u00a0Jr. They were eventually donated, along with a large collection of medieval art works, to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The buildings are beautiful and tranquil but fundamentally incongruous (modern architecture mixed with bits of decaying monasteries, gathered from meadows in Catalonia and France). This makes the Cloisters feel both unmoored from and tethered to time.<\/p>\n

Dacus had suggested the spot; it was her second visit in less than a year. \u201cI came here this summer with Phoebe, for the first time, and we took a tour,\u201d she said. \u201cAs you go through different eras, you notice so many of the same themes.\u201d That idea\u2014of a grand continuum, in which the circumstances change but all of our big human feelings (heartache, joy, unease, panic, contentment) remain the same, across time and vast distances\u2014felt germane to her new songs. \u201cAll love feels new and one of a kind, and it is,\u201d she said. \u201cBut also it\u2019s the most ancient feeling.\u201d When I pointed out to Dacus that \u201cForever Is a Feeling\u201d is essentially a concept record about the agony and ecstasy of romance, she let out a groan. \u201cIt makes my stomach hurt,\u201d she said. \u201cIt felt amazing to write. But now, on the brink of sharing it\u2014I could throw up. Every single day, I\u2019m just, like, \u2018I can\u2019t believe this is the job. Just plumb the depths and give it away!\u2019\u00a0\u201d<\/p>\n

We wandered along one cloister, stopping to admire a potted oleander with a sign that read \u201cPOISON<\/em>.\u201d \u201cThat was my great-uncle\u2019s last name,\u201d Dacus said, briefly assuming a thick Southern accent. \u201cOhhhh-lander,\u201d she drawled. (Her father\u2019s family is from Mississippi.) We settled on a stone bench in the chapter house, once a central part of Notre-Dame-de-Pontaut, a Benedictine monastery established in 1115, in Aquitaine. Every morning, the monks gathered there, arranging themselves on the long stone benches, to discuss the matters of the day. Now tourists and school groups inched past, whispering. Though no one approached Dacus directly, I couldn\u2019t help but notice how often passersby\u2014especially twentysomethings with cool haircuts and hand tattoos\u2014silently angled their phones toward her.<\/p>\n

Dacus and Baker have mostly kept their relationship private. Dacus didn\u2019t want to hide it, exactly, and anyone who pays attention to her new lyrics could probably piece it together, but she was still working out just how much she wanted to disclose into my little recording machine. Boygenius has an unusually fervent and engaged fan base\u2014perhaps because the band became very popular during the pandemic, when parasocial relationships were all we had, or perhaps because they make confessional music about intimate entanglements among various genders, which can be rare to find in popular music. In recent years, the scrutiny has become intense. There are long and detailed discussion threads online, speculating about the romance between Dacus and Baker. Dacus said that her followers have been respectful of her boundaries, but \u201cit only takes a handful to make your life feel like a really easily threatened thing.\u201d Then she added, \u201cI\u2019ve been practicing not reinforcing that narrative to myself.\u201d<\/p>\n

I told Dacus that I might not have asked about her love life if it weren\u2019t so plainly central to the songs. \u201cIt\u2019s been interesting, because I want to protect what is precious in my life, but also to be honest, and make art that\u2019s true,\u201d she said. \u201cI think maybe a part of it is just trusting that it\u2019s not at risk.\u201d She paused. \u201cMaybe a healthier way to think about it is that it\u2019s not actually fragile. These songs are about different people. But, you know, \u2018Most Wanted Man in West Tennessee\u2019\u2014what are you gonna do?\u201d (Baker was born and brought up outside Memphis.)<\/p>\n

That song is jangly and rich, featuring electric guitar, pump organ, and synthesizers. Tonally, it reminds me a little of Big Star\u2019s \u201cThirteen,\u201d in part because it captures something about the tenuousness of new love:<\/p>\n

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Now I feel your hand under the table, at the fancy restaurant
Gripping on my inner thigh, like if you don\u2019t I\u2019m gonna run
But I\u2019m not going anywhere, least not anywhere you\u2019re not<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Dacus said that she has only ever found romantic love with friends or collaborators. \u201cHow are you doing romance without friendship?\u201d she said, laughing. \u201cI can\u2019t imagine. That feels so hollow. It makes me feel ill! Someone that\u2019s not my friend? Are you serious? Almost every relationship I have been in, we\u2019ve had some business or creative dealings. I don\u2019t mean this just sexually, but it turns me on.\u201d She went on, \u201cTo have your minds meet on something, and be, like, \u2018Oh, my gosh, you said what I couldn\u2019t say. I love your mind.\u2019\u00a0\u201d<\/p>\n

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Cartoon by Ellis Rosen<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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One of my favorite tracks on the new record is \u201cFor Keeps,\u201d a gentle, cottony wisp of a song, barely more than two minutes long, just Dacus and an acoustic guitar. \u201cFor Keeps\u201d is about falling in love with someone who is fundamentally unavailable to you, or maybe you\u2019re unavailable to each other, who knows\u2014something doesn\u2019t align.<\/p>\n

The song begins with a sharp intake of breath. Dacus\u2019s vocals are close and unhurried. There\u2019s a hint of a tremble in her tone. I explained to her that I\u2019d been listening to the song in my car earlier that morning, when a flock of Canada geese flew low and heavy over the highway, and I found myself weeping, suddenly, inelegantly, because the whole thing just felt so unlikely\u2014the meaty old Canada goose is not the most probable flier, and we don\u2019t know how migratory birds find their way south, instinctively navigating between two poles. Yet there they went, perfectly aligned, hungry for warmth. The song ends with a sigh of resignation:<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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But I still miss you
When I\u2019m with you
\u2019Cause I know we\u2019re not
Playing for keeps<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

That final (and devastating) \u201cfor keeps\u201d might refer to the impossibility of the situation, to the star-crossed-ness of it all\u2014something big is keeping them apart\u2014or to just how formidably difficult it is to sustain love over time. I found it instructive: love anyway. Take off.<\/p>\n

\u201cHearing that\u2014thank God,\u201d Dacus said. She continued, \u201cI want there to be different conversations about love than the ones that are happening. I worry that when I talk about this I get really abstract or rote\u2014that it\u2019s impossible to talk about because it\u2019s been made into a corny, commodified thing. Love is such a money-maker, it\u2019s just not always pleasant,\u201d she said. \u201cWhenever you love anything a lot, you\u2019re booked for grief.\u201d On \u201cBest Guess,\u201d a sweet, hazy new song, Dacus sings about embracing the chanciness of it all:<\/p>\n

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I love your body
I love your mind
They will change
So will mine
But you are my best
Guess at the future
You are my best guess
If I were a gambling man, and I am
You\u2019d be my best bet<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Dacus and I eventually left the chapter house, walking around until we found the Unicorn Tapestries, a series of seven pieces, woven from wool, silk, and metallic thread, likely designed in France and produced in Brussels toward the end of the fifteenth century. No one knows exactly who made them, or how to definitively interpret their narrative, but there\u2019s something instantly striking about the iconography: a white unicorn is pursued, retaliates, is lured by a maiden, and then is caught, encircled by a fence, and chained to a tree trunk. Scholars have suggested that the tapestries might be an allegory of Christ, or, more likely, of marriage\u2014all the ways in which love and monogamy require subjugation, submission, capture. I\u2019d told Dacus earlier that I wanted to get a picture of them for my three-year-old daughter, who enjoys unicorns, though the more I looked at the series the less inclined I felt to take a photo.<\/p>\n

We wandered out onto the West Terrace, which overlooks the Hudson. To the left was the George Washington Bridge, and across the river stood the sheer cliffs of the Palisades. We leaned against a low rock wall, buttoning our coats against the wind. \u201cI\u2019ve been asking people how they define love,\u201d Dacus said. \u201cEverybody\u2019s answers are so interesting. My therapist had my favorite definition so far\u2014that love is the connective tissue between all of us that\u2019s easy to forget. I like that. Because it means it\u2019s just there.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u201cWhenever you love anything a lot, you\u2019re booked for grief,\u201d Dacus said.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/figure>\n

Dacus was born in the spring of 1995 and adopted by parents who brought her up in Mechanicsville, Virginia, a suburb of Richmond. \u201cMy mom was adopted, too,\u201d Dacus told me. \u201cMy parents always said, \u2018All of the universe had to align for you to be in our family. What are the chances, and how perfect is this?\u2019 I had friends who would say, \u2018Oh, you\u2019re like Little Orphan Annie. I\u2019m so sorry your parents didn\u2019t want you.\u2019 I was, like, \u2018No, my parents really did want me. You\u2019re probably a mistake.\u2019\u00a0\u201d She went on, \u201cAs a second grader, I was just a little bitch about it.\u201d Dacus has considered adopting a child herself, or perhaps becoming a foster parent one day. She is less inclined to have biological children. \u201cI don\u2019t think I would have the speed to change in the necessary ways,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

Growing up, she had limited information about her birth mother. \u201cOn my birthday every year, my mom was, like, \u2018I\u2019ll tell you anything, but only ask if you really want to know.\u2019 It felt like I really had to be choosy,\u201d she said. When Dacus turned eighteen, she received a large file of photographs and documents. \u201cIt was overwhelming, but also\u2014wow. These are just strangers, out in the world,\u201d she said, of her biological parents. At nineteen, Dacus met her birth mother, and they quickly forged a relationship. \u201cWe\u2019re very similar, more similar in personality than the family that raised me,\u201d she said. \u201cI have a brother who is biological to my parents. I think they saw themselves in him, and saw aspects of each other that frustrated them. I think he had a harder time growing up because he was related to them. Whereas they gave me the respect early on that I was an individual, and they were just finding out who I was.\u201d<\/p>\n

By the age of eight, Dacus was writing songs. Her earliest musical proclivities ran from classic (Led Zeppelin and the Cure) to fleeting and contemporary (\u201cFergalicious\u201d and the pop-punk band All Time Low). Her family is Baptist (though their church eventually transitioned to a nondenominational Protestant sect), and she grew up singing religious music. She described herself as \u201cvery, very dedicated\u201d to God as a child, but, by the time she was nineteen and studying film at Virginia Commonwealth University, \u201cit just kind of sublimated. It\u2019s not that I\u2019m not the same person. It\u2019s that my idea of God actually got so big that it didn\u2019t have boundaries anymore. I just felt like I had insane hubris for even trying to understand it.\u201d On \u201cMost Wanted Man,\u201d Dacus sings:<\/p>\n

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I still believe in God sometimes
It always takes me by surprise
To catch myself in the middle of praying<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\u201cThat happens,\u201d Dacus said. \u201cI\u2019ll be, like\u2014what is this? I don\u2019t even understand it. I don\u2019t think there\u2019s any work to be done to stop it.\u201d At the Cloisters, we had briefly discussed the work of Thomas Merton, the poet and Trappist monk who wrote often about the containment or rechannelling of desire, although, as I\u2019d told Dacus, scholars assume that he broke his vow of celibacy. \u201cO.K. Cool. Respect,\u201d Dacus had said, laughing. Her own relationship to religion forced her to contend with an inclination toward stifling (or at least judging) normal feelings of yearning and lust. \u201cI was raised, generally, to think wanting things was bad\u2014it was of the body, of the flesh. You should just be content with the life you\u2019re given,\u201d she said. \u201cThat\u2019s a good practice, because it helps you look around and realize that most of the time you have everything you need. But becoming O.K. with wanting things is big. That\u2019s not evil, that\u2019s not bad\u2014that\u2019s actually life.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Later, I asked Dacus if growing up in the church had affected the way she thought about her sexuality. She replied that it had delayed the development of her entire sense of self. \u201cThinking of myself at all felt selfish and vain,\u201d she wrote in a text message. \u201cMaybe I was subconsciously protecting myself from becoming a pariah, my whole community was rooted in the church, pretty much everyone I loved was there, so it\u2019s not something I could jeopardize.\u201d She went on, \u201cI have journal entries from when I was seven wishing I could just marry my girl friends and bemoaning that it could never happen because I wasn\u2019t, and would never be, a lesbian.\u201d She officially came out, she said, when she was nineteen, during an interview with NPR. \u201cI said, \u2018I\u2019m kinda queer,\u2019\u00a0\u201d she remembered, laughing. She described the realization as \u201ca slow fade. Friends of mine were just, like, \u2018You\u2019re gay,\u2019 repeatedly, for a long time.\u201d<\/p>\n

Dacus eventually dropped out of V.C.U. There had been an administrative issue with her scholarship, but she also felt stalled out and understimulated. She got a day job at a store called Richmond Camera, where she edited and prepared school photos to be printed on mugs and key chains. She was writing songs every day, and described the process as a way of talking to herself; the precise mechanics of the work remain mysterious to her. \u201cI don\u2019t want to think about it too hard, because it just happens,\u201d she said. \u201cIf I knew the source, I would go, and I would probably tap it out. Someone once spoke about it as seeing a wild animal in your back yard, and then being as still as possible so that it\u2019ll stay around.\u201d<\/p>\n

In 2016, Dacus released \u201cNo Burden,\u201d her first LP, on Egghunt Records, a local label; a few months later, the album was rereleased by Matador Records. Dacus\u2019s early songs are spare and haunting, but it was evident, even then, that she had a knack for writing the sorts of hooks and choruses that land like a gut punch. \u201cWhat I like most about her is the intention she puts behind everything. No decision is made without meaning,\u201d the singer and songwriter Claire Cottrill, who records as Clairo, told me recently. \u201cShe\u2019s someone who really listens, which is what makes her a great artist.\u201d<\/p>\n

The record appeared on several year-end lists. Dacus played a Tiny Desk concert, performed at Lollapalooza, and booked a series of gigs opening for Baker, who had just released \u201cSprained Ankle,\u201d her d\u00e9but album. Bridgers, whose first record, \u201cStranger in the Alps,\u201d came out in 2017, also ended up as an opener on that tour. The three of them\u2014all in their early twenties and playing the sort of moody, rickety guitar rock typically made by lanky white men\u2014became fast friends. Eventually, they decided to record together. In March, 2018, Dacus released \u201cHistorian,\u201d her second album, and, seven months later, boygenius released its self-titled EP.<\/p>\n

In 2019, Dacus moved from Richmond to Philadelphia, where she shared a five-bedroom house with seven roommates; in 2021, she released \u201cHome Video,\u201d her third album. It\u2019s a gutsy, thoughtful meditation on coming of age and the often excruciating ways that teen-agers grasp at identity, desperate to discover who they are. \u201cHer work has the gift of being able to fall upon the inanimate or the mundane, and pull from it the startlingly intimate,\u201d the singer Hozier, who provides guest vocals on \u201cBullseye,\u201d a new song, told me. \u201cI\u2019ve always loved the eye through which her lyrical voice finds the world.\u201d That April, Dacus performed the single \u201cHot & Heavy\u201d on \u201cThe Late Show with Stephen Colbert,\u201d which was still filming remotely. She stood onstage in an empty theatre with her band, looking regal and plaintive, wearing a long black dress and crimson lipstick. It\u2019s a song about a teen-age love affair\u2014\u201cHot and heavy in the basement of your parents\u2019 place,\u201d Dacus sings on the chorus\u2014that goes sour: \u201cThe most that I could give to you is nothing at all\u00a0\/\u00a0The best that I could offer was to miss your calls.\u201d Dacus is an understated performer, verging on laconic, but her stillness is transfixing, and feels true to the way that desire itself is often a paralyzing force. All three members of boygenius are good at capturing the awkwardness and intensity of sex, but, whereas Bridgers and Baker tend to deploy dissonance and tension, Dacus\u2019s delivery is softer, quieter, more peaceful.<\/p>\n

Dacus had not anticipated the wild success of \u201cThe Record,\u201d and, for a while, boygenius took priority over her solo career. \u201cWe had these big goals of playing sick shows. But it immediately outpaced our expectations. We just had to adjust. I\u2019m still shocked,\u201d Dacus said. \u201cThat\u2019s something all of us talk about and work on. I feel dissociated. I also feel like it could go away in a second. Because, if it can show up in a second, it can go away in a second.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the summer of 2023, Barack Obama posted a playlist of his favorite songs, which included boygenius\u2019s \u201cNot Strong Enough,\u201d a track about not being tough or steady or sane enough to sustain a relationship. (\u201cNot Strong Enough\u201d is emblematic of a slight but recurring theme in the boygenius catalogue: \u201cI\u2019m sorry, I can\u2019t, don\u2019t hate me.\u201d) Obama\u2019s playlists are always suspiciously well calibrated\u2014John Coltrane and Ice Spice and Leonard Cohen and Rosal\u00eda\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. sure. But most artists still find it a funny thrill to be included. Dacus retweeted the playlist, adding the phrase \u201cwar criminal \ud83d\ude41 .\u201d\u00a0The words immediately became a meme. At one point, the journalist Taylor Lorenz posted an Instagram story with a photo of Joe Biden accompanied by the phrase, an event that likely contributed to her departure from the Washington Post<\/em>. \u201cMy issue was being used in a personality campaign without my consent,\u201d Dacus told me one evening. \u201cI was actually really surprised that people don\u2019t already know that every President is a war criminal, and, also, war itself is criminal.\u201d She went on, \u201cI would say the same about Biden, I would say the same about Trump.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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In the fall of 2024, as boygenius was finishing its first world tour, Dacus and Baker moved together to Los Angeles. \u201cIt\u2019s so interesting how home just moves,\u201d she said. \u201cI was once debating with a therapist whether I should move or not. She was, like, \u2018Your sense of home might move before you do.\u2019 L.A. just felt like the strongest magnet. I\u2019m expecting that to change.\u201d She added, \u201cI anticipate wanting to be back in more rural areas, like maybe back to the South at some point.\u201d She had been missing aspects of the East Coast lately\u2014the rolling farms of rural Virginia, \u201cthe outlying areas, the apple orchards. I miss dense foliage. I miss shade,\u201d Dacus said. It was hard to tell how urgent any of this was. \u201cLife is long, or short.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. We don\u2019t know.\u201d<\/p>\n

Dacus was travelling during the L.A. fires, in January, and a friend had asked if she wanted anything from her house removed for safekeeping. It seemed as though, at any moment, the winds might shift, threatening her neighborhood. \u201cI care about everything,\u201d Dacus said. \u201cI\u2019m very sentimental\u2014I could mourn each individual sweater for its own reason. But the one thing where I was, like, \u2018Please grab this\u2019 was my journals.\u201d I thought of the first verse from \u201cTrust,\u201d a single from \u201cNo Burden.\u201d It evokes the gulf between what we think and what we say, what we want and what we do:<\/p>\n

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I set a fire on the stove
And fed it every word I wrote
I watched my journals turn to smoke
Now all there is is what I spoke<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

A few weeks later, I met Dacus at the Huntington, an art museum, library, and botanical garden in San Marino, just northeast of L.A. The fires had largely subsided, but the city felt strange: hushed and stricken in some corners, business as usual in others. \u201cToday, before I came here, I had on my shitty clothes and my mask and I was cleaning my back porch,\u201d Dacus said. \u201cI was just looking at that ash, thinking, I can\u2019t believe this is somebody\u2019s house.<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n

The Huntington estate was purchased in 1903 by Henry Edward Huntington, a railroad tycoon; he established a library and a museum in 1919, and they opened to the public in 1928, after his death. Huntington started collecting fine art in his sixties, guided by his second wife, Arabella. (A 1938 article in Life<\/em> described Huntington\u2019s collection of eighteenth-century British portraits as \u201cfar and away the greatest group\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. ever assembled by any one man.\u201d) He also oversaw the cultivation of nearly a hundred and twenty acres of gardens. Some of the plants are rare, and theft has become a problem. The museum had begun placing \u201cTHIS PLANT WAS STOLEN<\/em>\u201d signs in gardens where specimens had been pilfered.<\/p>\n

\u201cI really, really like it here,\u201d Dacus said, as we made our way toward the Chinese Garden, fifteen acres winding around a koi pond. We stopped to admire narcissi, flowering quinces, and some freaky chunks of limestone, described by the Huntington as \u201cunusual rocks with energy.\u201d \u201cJulien and I are members. Last time, we brought a blanket and snacks and our books, and lay in the garden for, like, two hours, just napping and reading,\u201d she said. \u201cWe have memberships because Phoebe gave them to us for my birthday.\u201d (On \u201cGarden Song,\u201d a smoky, aching number from \u201cPunisher,\u201d Bridgers, an L.A. native, sings, \u201cI don\u2019t know when you got taller \/ See our reflection in the water\u00a0\/\u00a0Off a bridge at the Huntington\u00a0\/\u00a0I hopped the fence when I was seventeen.\u201d) It was hard not to think of the gardens themselves as a study of change. \u201cThat\u2019s the thing about nature,\u201d Dacus said. \u201cEvery single day, the air is different, the light\u2019s different. Things are growing.\u201d<\/p>\n

Boygenius is currently inactive. \u201cThe decision to take time off came even before the record came out. We always said, \u2018One year,\u2019\u00a0\u201d Dacus said. It\u2019s not easy to say no to more money, more attention. Yet the band had predetermined the time frame on the basis of ideas of self-preservation. \u201cLet\u2019s protect our friendship, let\u2019s protect our energy, let\u2019s not have each other feel pressure to keep it going for the others,\u201d she said. \u201cIt was so much fun, and I think we ended at the perfect time.\u201d<\/p>\n

We left the Huntington at dusk, and headed to Houston\u2019s, a steak house in Pasadena. It\u2019s the type of restaurant\u2014dark-wood panelling, red leather, a flickering neon sign out front\u2014where people clink Martinis, celebrate anniversaries, close deals. We sat in a booth and began disassembling a fried artichoke. Our conversation wound back, perhaps inevitably, toward relationships\u2014how easy it is to talk about romantic love as an exquisite and transformative experience, a thing that buoys and saves you. Of course, it often sucks. Maybe it even mostly sucks. \u201cIt\u2019s painful to get to a beautiful place sometimes,\u201d is how Dacus put it.<\/p>\n

The next morning, Dacus was directing a music video for \u201cBest Guess.\u201d I arrived on set\u2014a cavernous soundstage near LAX\u2014just before lunchtime. A few weeks earlier, she had posted an entreaty on social media, calling for anyone identifying as a \u201chot masc\u201d to audition for the video. \u201cI was, like, \u2018Hope you like the snippet. Send to the hot masc in your life,\u2019\u00a0\u201d she said. Dacus received more than five thousand replies. In recent months, some online queer communities have been opining about what they say is a lack of hot mascs. \u201cSo I wanted to highlight some cool masc people,\u201d she said. \u201cI thought that TikTok would be the perfect place for it, because I needed people who are comfortable looking into a camera, which is truly a skill set that some people have and some people don\u2019t.\u201d She added, laughing, \u201cEverybody here has it. I\u2019m the least suave person at this shoot, for sure.\u201d<\/p>\n

Now here they were\u2014the artist and dancer Janae Holster; the TikTok star Mattie Westbrouck; Naomi McPherson, of MUNA; and the singer and guitarist Towa Bird, among others, including the actor and model Cara Delevingne\u2014wearing suits, posing, grinning, cheering. The pop star Chappell Roan, who has advocated aggressively for L.G.B.T.Q.+ rights, told me that Dacus \u201ccares deeply for her community. She shows up for them in every way she can. She is an artist who gives a fuck.\u201d<\/p>\n

At lunch, Dacus and I brought our plates into a dressing room. \u201cOne of my favorite videos of all time is the \u2018Queen\u2019 video by Janelle Mon\u00e1e,\u201d Dacus said. \u201cIt has Erykah Badu in it. Her whole thing is black and white and a little red. They shot in front of a flat wall. I\u2019ve never made a music video like that. I\u2019m always interested in doing a thing that a lot of people have done, in a way that I don\u2019t think anyone has yet, in a way that I wish I\u2019d seen at a young age.\u201d<\/p>\n

For the video, Dacus and her hot mascs had been playing poker and darts, arm-wrestling, boxing, puffing cigars, lifting weights. There was a loosely choreographed group dance. Dacus seemed happy, self-assured, and at ease. \u201cEvery idea that I had is happening, and kind of how I thought it would, too,\u201d she said. \u201cI feel really good doing this.\u201d\u00a0\u2666<\/p>\n

An earlier version of this story misrepresented Dacus\u2019s audition call for the \u201cBest Guess\u201d music video.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Amanda Petrusich
Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One morning in January, I met the musician Lucy Dacus at the Cloisters, the medieval-art museum at the northwestern tip of Manhattan, overlooking the Hudson River. Dacus is a formidable solo artist\u2014since 2016, she has released three albums of searching, intimate folk rock\u2014but she\u2019s perhaps best known as one-third of the indie supergroup boygenius, alongside<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":838759,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[705,99859],"tags":[10344,142982],"class_list":["post-838758","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-songs","category-subversive","tag-songs","tag-subversive"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/838758","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=838758"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/838758\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/838759"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=838758"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=838758"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=838758"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}