Whenever one of my several specifically curated playlists ends, there is one song I can always expect to play. For some reason Spotify connects “Night Shift” by Lucy Dacus to everything I listen to. Perhaps it resulted from the time period in 2020 when we were stuck in quarantine and the only escape from my bedroom was to drive up and down the interstate screaming that song at the top of my lungs. It has been in my top five songs on my Spotify Wrapped for three years in a row now. “Night Shift” welcomed me to the rest of Lucy Dacus’s discography, to which I discovered that she is one of the most astounding song-writers of this generation.
Richmond, Virginia native, Lucy Dacus has three studio albums under her belt; No Burden, Historian, and Home Video. She debuted with No Burden in 2016 and sparked the attention of Matador Records. No Burden is so beautifully produced it’s hard to believe that this was only her first album. When she released her sophomore album Historian in 2018, she was brought even more acclaim. Historian was an album full of home runs, so with the release of Home Video in 2021, Lucy had surely mastered her craft. I still have not retired from listening to “Hot & Heavy” and “Brando”. In 2018, Lucy also met with artists Phoebe Bridgers and Julien Baker to form a trio called Boygenius and together they put out a self-titled EP. Although there have been crickets about a collaboration for another album, Lucy, Phoebe, and Julien seem to lend each other their voices for background vocals on each of their own albums here and there.
One of the things that really connects a listener to Lucy Dacus is her honesty and openness about her own experiences. In her recent single, “Kissing Lessons”, she tells a story of two young girls who are tangled in the webs of heteronormativity, while they practice kissing lessons on each other. As the narration of the song continues between the lines you learn that there is conflict about what these kissing lessons may mean to one of them. Lucy identifies as a queer woman and she also grew up as a Christian in the South. She uses her experiences with faith and sexuality in her story-telling with songs like in “Triple Dog Dare”. You can read Lucy’s essay on her experiences with coming out in her essay she wrote for Oprah Daily.
In “Night Shift”, Lucy repeats the gut-punching lyrics, “In five years I hope the songs feel like covers, dedicated to new lovers” and five years later this song has reached almost 45 million streams on Spotify. With her powerful voice and gift for story-telling, she is surely an artist to look out for.