Lucy Dacus has long been famous in indie circles for her tender yet fiercely all-consuming songs. But capital-F Fame came for her in 2023. As one third of boygenius, she won three Grammys and a Brit award for the band’s debut album, The Record, alongside Phoebe Bridgers and Julien Baker.
Her first album since boygenius went stratospheric, Forever is a Feeling, is a rapturous record that deals with all the ups and downs of romantic love, fed fuel by the revelation that Dacus is in a committed relationship with bandmate Baker. During a tour pitstop in Amsterdam, we called Lucy to talk about what we mean when we talk about love, how weird it is to be famous and channelling the eternal icon that is Miss Piggy.
Where are you in the world right now?
I'm in Amsterdam - we've been here for a couple days. We had a day off, and then we played last night. It's just it's one of the best cities, so everybody's in a good mood and like running around and being silly.
Are you like somebody who thrives being away from home, or are you yearning to get back?
I used to thrive. I've been thinking about this because I used to prefer tour to home life, and now that I prefer my home life to tour, I mean, I love both. But it makes touring a lot harder, because I'm like, romanticising my couch and my dog and my backyard. It's just, it's a little harder. But when you have a good show, there's really nothing better.
Forever Is A Feeling has been out for a little while now. Has anything surprised you about the reaction to the record?
I mean, I don't expect much, so pretty much everything is a surprise. There's an aspect to it that has been surprising: it's a record about a breakup and falling in love and some people think that it's just sweet or something... I'm like: it's extremely painful to love someone! Being like, ‘Oh, this is nice or sweet or cute’ but actually real love makes you afraid of death. And some of the songs that I think some people think are cute are actually very heavy to me. Even though love is a very beautiful thing, it weighs.
Do you experience any of the songs differently now that they're like out in the world?
Come Out I almost cut from the record because I thought, Oh, this is a little precious sounding. I love how it's written but maybe the melody is repetitive or something... but that seems to be a fan favorite. And a lot of the songs are really wordy, I realised - I've made a record that's kind of hard to sing along to because even I'm having a hard time. I'm taking deep breaths wherever I can just to do it. It's very funny watching people try to sing along. Sometimes, if I see somebody struggling to get through the words, I'll laugh and then I'll mess up.
When you write a song about someone, do you tell them?
If I love them, yes. If I want our relationship to continue. Because, really, if I wrote it, its main purpose is to communicate. Like, putting it out is like an afterthought. If it's somebody that I don't talk to anymore and I don't want to talk to, then I won't show it to them. That's kind of my business. I have had a lot of really pivotal conversations that start with sending a song and being like, I figured out how I feel. You know, if you want to talk about it, we can.
Before the album came out, you talked about being apprehensive sharing so much. How are you feeling about that now? Did it go the way you thought it would?
I'm kind of surprised at myself for giving this much because it's not comfortable! It's very precious to me but also it's like, if I'm going to make and share work that is real to me, it's going to be about my real life unless I choose to just write fiction. So it didn't feel like there was really an alternative. My daily life on tour is just about the shows. So focusing on that has been really good because there have been times when people have asked questions and I have to be like, ‘I don't want to talk about that.’ I've never felt like my personal life has, like, cultural value or something - and I don't like it. I would much prefer people just get into the music for what it is than who it's about.
Have you ever written a song and been like, okay, that's too much. I'm not sharing that. That's just for me.
There's kind of like whole categories - like anything I've ever written about my family, I keep to myself. But I still write it because that's for me. All of it's for me first. Sometimes. I'll go back and mine old songs for gems and put them in something else, recontextualize things. And that's kind of nice to do. A song that’s not dead, but dormant for years - and then you give it new life. Never kill your darlings.
Do you keep diaries?
I just started a new one, which feels so good. Let me tell you, I think it's journal 22 and I think I passed 3000 pages.
Wow.
Yeah, I'm on page 3321.
How long has it taken to get to 3321 pages?
What's really sweet is my kindergarten teacher, when I was like five years old, gave everyone a composition notebook and explained, “This is your journal. This is your diary, and you can put your private thoughts in here. And did you know that you have private thoughts? No adult should look at it, this is just for you.” Teaching and acknowledging you have an inner world when I was that young was one of the best lessons and gifts I probably got as a kid. And I would just write whatever I thought and everything that I knew about people and so yeah, I guess that's like, over 20 years of journaling.
Do you read them back or do you just know they’re there?
I don't, unless I need to, like, check a primary source document. Or at the beginning of COVID when we thought we were going to be inside for two months I was like, “Oh, maybe I'll type up my journals” because actually a journal was stolen from me and I lost three years of my life. And since then, I've been like, I should type these up so that they can exist elsewhere. And I got to age 16, and was like, “...I need to stop there.” Childhood is very sweet and funny, but then I encountered a person who came into my life and was about to cause a bunch of wreckage, so I was like, I'm not in the mood for reliving that.
In one interview, you said you'd been asking people how they define love. How do you define love?
I think of love as something that is always there that you either opt into or out of. Love is something that connects all of us, and it's our fault if we forget about it. And it's actually easy to forget and have other things get in the way.
I think that there's been a specific effort to define love as just romance so that it can be packaged and sold. But love establishes joyful imbalances, which is an idea I got from this book called The Communism of Love by Richard Gilman-Opalsky, where he's just talking about how real love is anti capitalist, because, from a loving place, you give and don't get anything back - there's not actually an exchange. It's just for the sake of love that you take care of people. For me, though, it has a lot to do with trust and respect and allowing people the dignity of their own experience. And I don't know... I wouldn't say that I know, but I am thinking about it almost all the time.
When people find themselves in romantic relationships with AI and chatGPT, do you think that’s love?
That's a crazy question. I think it’s helping people feel not lonely. I think that love can make you feel not lonely, but I would venture to say that I don't think that that's love. Maybe I need to think more about it. I think that it might touch upon your capacity for love but it's going nowhere. So that feels like a loss. Ultimately, it's very self centered. And I think it admits that a lot of people want their love to be tailor made. They don't want somebody who could ever leave them. They want to completely control something. And that's not how human relationships work. They want something that lacks death - the AI version of a person will never die, never ever change, always be with you. Always be a mirror. And that's so dark because if you're trying to opt out of change... you're not going to do it.
How has your experience of becoming famous been - how do you find it?
Well, it's weird. I still kind of bristle at the idea that I am but then again, I just spent like, a whole day with my friend who lives in Amsterdam and people kept coming up. I only see him every couple years for the past, like, 11 years, and something has changed since the last time I saw him. He's like, ‘Whoa, what's up with this? This is my town, how do people know who you are?’ And I think that it's really odd.
I think among people who experience notoriety, I have a good batch of it - just because my fans seem to be pretty chill and they like the music. And sure, there's people who run and try to film you doing something, or ask you weird questions, or take physical liberties. It's not great. Imagine doing that to any other person - it's just so obvious that it's odd behavior. I don't know why, culturally, we think that it's okay for people who are in the public eye. But I also try to just be in a good mood when I can, and be like ‘Their intentions are so pure and from the heart’ that I just want to respond in kind. But, yeah, I would say that I would wish this job for anyone, but I wouldn't wish fame on anyone. It’s a catch 22 because I feel very grateful and blessed to make music that people actually want to hear and be able to talk to people and travel the world. But fame is innately bad.
I can't imagine it not changing your brain fundamentally in some way. It's just a very different way of being alive.
Usually if you went to therapy and told your therapist: I feel like people are looking at me. You’d be like, ‘You’re paranoid, that’s in your head.’ But it’s what’s happening! So what do you do with that?
What do you do with that? How do you cope with it?
I will say, I stay in my house more. But I also don't want to be a shut-in. I have friends that just avoid people and I like to live, so I try to go out.
Do you ever wear a disguise?
No, but I can, like, put on a hat. I don't have a ton of really defining features. Some people have, like, hair that they can't get away from, or their height gives them away, or they have very obvious tattoos or something. I just walk fast and head down. But yeah, I don't know. It's a very common topic of conversation between friends of mine that's like: What the hell?! It's unexpected.
What is the most annoying assumption people make about you?
[long pause] Here's kind of an answer. This is the first record where there's love songs since people have been really paying attention to my sexuality. I talked about it a little bit before this but definitely, with boygenius it kind of came to the fore. And I am really heartbroken by the idea that people would assume that love songs about a woman are a subset of love. I don't like the idea that straight people would be like, ‘Oh, that's not for me because that person is not straight’. Love is the same experience - or rather, it's a different experience for everyone, where we can recognise ourselves and each other. These songs are not just for gay people because I'm gay, and that assumption... I feel like I have been seeing that happen a few times. Everyone's welcome! The words you would use to categorise a love are not more important than the love itself.
What are you reading right now?
I’m reading this book called The Solutions Are Already Here by Peter Gelderloos, which is a book basically outlining how fucked we are ecologically and politically. But then the end of it is [about] protest movements that have actually worked. I just finished The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington, it's so fun. I recommend it. It's about this 90 year old woman who gets brought to a senile old ladies home and then it's run by a cult - but then there's a counter cult that is all the old women. It's kind of witchy. And also that writer, Leonard Carrington, is an amazing painter, and was Max Ernst’s lover, who's, like, one of the most famous German painters.
For Pride Month. I'm reading a couple gay classics, like The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein, and De Profundis by Oscar Wilde, which is like this amazing diss track, to put it stupidly. He wrote this letter in prison to his lover who was the reason he got put into prison, basically being like, “This is how you ruined my life. But I still love you.”
I'm gonna start Counternarratives by John Keen - I've read his poetry, and he's incredible.
That’s a library’s worth of books! How much time do you spend reading?
It's so hard when I'm packing. It takes like 30 minutes to pack my clothes, and it takes like three days to choose the books I'm gonna bring.
So Rory Gilmore.
I mean, I would be lying if I said they didn't raise me a little bit, the Gilmore Girls. But I like to read stuff that is connected to the place I'm going, or the time that I'm in. And, you know, recommendations can skip the line. For tour, it has to be lightweight enough. I have a few, really long books at home that I was like, ‘I'm not carrying this’.
Would you ever write a book?
If I could figure out how? But I will admit that I tried and I hated myself, so maybe I need to wait, like, 10 years or something.
A few times you’ve recreated iconic magazine covers and cultural moments in photographs. Have you got an idea for one you’d like to do that you haven’t yet?
I think it'd be amazing to do the Bound cover - it’s two people, so I don't know who I would do that with. There's a femme fatale and a butch, they both look really hot. That could be fun. And then, honestly, I feel like there's just endless Miss Piggy inspo. Do you know Miss Piggy in the UK?
Yeah, we know Miss Piggy!
I feel like, unspokenly, she's legitimately on mood boards - not just for me, like, big stars too. She is a style icon and deserves to be recognised as such.
