Leading up to the March 28 release of her fourth album Forever Is A Feeling, Lucy Dacus has been drawing renewed attention for her recent singles “Ankles” and “Best Guess”. Dacus is perhaps best recognized as the tallest third of Grammy-winning supergroup boygenius. (There’s a Modern Family clip I can never find in which Phil Dunphy says, “That’s like asking if I have a favorite child — of course I do”, and that is how I feel if you ask my favorite member of boygenius. How DARE you ask when I love them all so much, but also… definitely Lucy.) As a solo artist, Dacus’s best-known songs include “Night Shift” and “Hot & Heavy.” I love these songs, but now I want to put the spotlight on a few lesser-known songs that I consider equally essential to her discography. Here I aim to do the opposite of gatekeeping: I am forcefully shoving you into the gates. I implore you to listen to these and experience them fully.
- Going Going Gone
This is my go-to song as a sunset enthusiast. When I see a beautiful blazing sky, I’m inevitably going to think of lyrics like “The sunset threw a tantrum” and “The color filtered out / Like pulling teeth out of a cloud”. For a long time, sunset viewing was the main reason I found for listening to this song, but lately I’ve come to appreciate the non-sunset-affiliated portions as well. The song begins with a story of childhood romance with an awkward boy, then zooms out to view the man he grows up to be. It’s a pretty devastating look on the cycles of toxicity perpetuated by the patriarchy through generations. But on a lighter note, Julien Baker’s dog, Beans, is credited for background vocals in this song!
- Dream State…
I’ll admit I don’t know Lucy Dacus’s first album, “No Burden,” as well as her later work, but this song is a standout to me. The song laments a relationship with a deep history that has since been ended by external forces, rendering the other person unrecognizable. The repeated, building refrain of “Without you, I am surely the last of our kind” is heartbreaking to me in ways I can’t describe.
- Cartwheel
Maybe I’m just a sucker for insects and bioluminescence, but opening a song with “Here and there and gone again / Firefly juice on your skin” is a surefire way to pique my interest. I am fascinated by the language this song uses to evoke nostalgia for childhood summers: “cracked blacktop curling up,” “heat lightning on a summer night,” “cartwheel and a broken wrist”. I also can never get over how well Dacus captures the pain of old friendships changing in adolescence. Being forced to confront the reality of growing up is such a unique kind of loss. The crumbling of an imagined future together — “Now there’s only past and present day” — feels so immensely tragic, even if it’s only letting go of a childhood vow to run away and live in the woods together. Interestingly, I think this sort of escapism is reimagined with an alternate ending in “Triple Dog Dare,” a later track on the same album.
- Nonbeliever
This is another reflection on her younger days — this one centered around her religious upbringing. While I don’t personally relate to this struggle, the repeated final line of “Everybody else, everybody else looks like they’ve figured it out” goes so hard that I had to include this one on the list. I’m not sure what it says about my music taste that I would classify this song as a “banger”. (This is also how I’d describe a majority of boygenius songs.)
- Triple Dog Dare
The final track of “Home Video” spans almost eight minutes of emotional storytelling. The song is based on a close friendship from Dacus’s teenage years that faltered due to the friend’s overprotective religious mother, who forbade them from seeing each other — perhaps sensing an underlying homoerotic dimension to their relationship that Dacus herself didn’t recognize until years later. Towards the end of the song, the lyrics imagine an alternate timeline in which the two girls steal the family boat and run away together, fending for themselves. Their fate is left ambiguous, but their families never find them: “They put our faces on the milk jugs / Missing children ’til they gave up / Your mama was right, but through the grief / Can’t fight the feeling of relief.” The reference to missing people on milk cartons always reminds me of “Strangers,” the final track on Ethel Cain’s Preacher’s Daughter (another one of my favorite albums ever). Whatever happened to the two characters in “Triple Dog Dare,” they almost certainly met a better fate than the fictitious Ethel Cain character of Preacher’s Daughter… but that’s a whole other album’s worth of lore to dissect.
- My Mother & I
I am the type of person who makes a Spotify playlist for every hyper-specific idea that strikes me. One example of this is a currently very short playlist called “mitochondria,” for songs about inheritance through the female line. “My Mother & I” features on this playlist. (Other songs on the playlist include “marjorie” by Taylor Swift, “The Baton” by Katie Gavin, and “knitting song” by Paris Paloma. I welcome further recommendations.) In this song, Dacus devastatingly portrays the negative self-perception and body image issues that can be pervasive through generations of women: “My mother hates her body / We share the same outline / She swears that she loves mine”. She goes on to sing about mirrored personality traits between mother and daughter, both for better and for worse, and about the depth of gratitude for a mother’s sacrifices. Naturally, my biology nerd self is going to connect this to mitochondrial DNA, which is inherited only through the maternal line. In the interest of brevity, I shall refrain from giving a whole TED Talk on that subject… for now.
- Fool’s Gold
Part of a series of songs Dacus released in 2019 corresponding to various holidays (such as her “La Vie en rose” and “Last Christmas” covers), this original song focuses on the strange feeling of New Year’s. It holds a sense of confusion, melancholy, and anxiety about the coming year and the inevitable passage of time: “A new year begins, it ushers us in / The knot in my gut is coming with”. At the same time, there is a sense of levity and gratitude in the uncertainty: “I can’t tell how big my heart is / Let’s open the doors, see how many fit / Like drunks in a bathtub, keep piling in”. So many terrible things in the future are unknowable, and there may be times that test one’s capacity for despair, but there will also be times to discover the extent of one’s capacity for love. Maybe hope is merely “fool’s gold,” but it still persists. Looking back, there is a strange irony in this song being released in November 2019, near the end of the last year that felt “normal” in many ways. For me, many recent years — including, most recently, 2024 — have seemed to entail life getting dramatically worse and dramatically better in different ways, almost simultaneously. The news gets almost comically worse every day, but I keep meeting new people to love in this world. This song, I think, perfectly captures that feeling.