With her new album, Lucy Dacus explores messy love, political exhaustion, and what it really means to show up—for yourself, your community, and the planet.
Lucy Dacus (yes, that Lucy Dacus—the three-time Grammy Award winner for her work with supergroup boygenius alongside Phoebe Bridgers and Julien Baker, who graced our 30th anniversary issue cover in 2023) is pacing back and forth in an empty room in The Soho House in L.A. She turns her computer to show me the view from the window. “We are showing the record to some people and this was the biggest room we could find [for the call],”she says. When I say Dacus is easy to talk to, I really mean it. I barely had to look at my notes during our call. She’s a natural conversationalist, she is witty, she is thoughtful, and she gives big best friend/genius boyfriend vibes so hard it’s almost weird to accept that I don’t actually know her.
She has been going nonstop. The night before she played a benefit to raise money for those affected by the L.A. fires and is gearing up to start a short run of intimate shows before she heads off on her North American tour in support of her fourth solo album, Forever Is a Feeling (March 28). She tells me that she’s just wrapped the album’s second music video for “Best Guess”; she’d put an open casting call out for the video in January via TikTok seeking “hot mascs” and ended up casting 13 people from the contest, alongside Dacus’s friends E.R. Fightmaster, Towa Bird, Cara Delevingne, and Naomi McPherson from Muna. The result was a hot masc explosion. She gushes that the best part of shooting the video was how the entire cast came as strangers and left as friends, exchanged numbers, and formed a special bond. “Everyone was like ‘Oh, my God. I have never been in a room with this many people that look like me,’ and I think it was a really unique day for all of us.” She goes on to lament how the video made her think about making art. “That can be a very beautiful thing about art—you think you spend all the time making it for its sake but I kind of feel like the art is the by-product of a scenario. Like, for everyone else that’s the whole story but for everyone involved that’s the scrapbook of the experience that we had.”
She hasn’t just been busy with the album but also with activism. The moment Trump got reelected he began rolling back protections for the transgender community, including signing several damaging ant-trans executive orders, one of which stated that the federal government would no longer provide funds to “promote gender ideology.” Dacus took to Twitter, stating: “The government will never be the source of our validation or protection, we have to do it ourselves.” And then put her money where her mouth is. “I was very disheartened by news about the administration basically trying to make it illegal to be trans so I was like, ‘Okay, I am giving $10,000 away in $500 increments, until it is gone, to anybody who puts their GoFundMe links in this tweet.’” She explains that the money went fast but that wasn’t the only intended goal of the tweet: “The point was I wanted it publicly seen so other people could scroll through and fund people and to just be something that anybody could participate in if they wanted to.” And though she was able to directly help some people seeking gender-affirming surgery, she knows that there is always more work to be done. “It felt good to do and I know it wasn’t futile but to me it doesn’t feel like enough, and I think maybe it never will. And that is what a life is made of: continuing to try and knowing that you are never actually going to have done enough, but it is still worth doing.”
I needed to know how she is taking care of herself with all that was going on politically; personally and professionally, what is her self-care practice like? She giggles and then pauses, “Self-care? Ummm…I have been trying to meditate because people say it works. I am really bad at it. My just mind just wanders. It feels selfish, so far. Again, that feeling of like nothing is ever enough. When I take time for myself, I’m like, ‘Oh, I’m taking it away from somebody else.’ And if any friend said that to me I would say, ‘That’s crazy, shut up, your life is important and you need time.’ But that doesn’t mean that I take my own advice.” Okay, meditation isn’t working for her, so what is her self-care? “I mean, on good days I will have quiet mornings and make my tea and read a book. I am reading the new Robin Wall Kimmerer book, The Serviceberry. She’s a great writer; she did Braiding Sweetgrass and Gathering Moss and she’s an awesome scientist. I am also reading this book called The Solutions Are Already Here by Peter Gelderloos, which was recommended to me by my friend E.R. [Fightmaster] and it’s very depressing because it tells you how bad things actually are, but it also provides a lot of examples of how the Earth can recover if we give it time and attention. It also really hits home…” She cuts herself off and laughs. “You asked me how I’m taking care of myself and I’m not really answering you.” She did, though; clearly her self-care is getting lost in a book.
I knew she would have some solid recommendations for books to help BUST readers stay motivated and active during these depressing political times. She dove right in.
“The book I was talking about [The Solutions], I am not done with it yet but it seems good. It made me have a panic attack at first because it’s like, “Oh wow, things are really messed up ecologically, but I like when I can read things that do offer tangible solutions.” Her book recs keep going. “I read this book called The Communism of Love, which was another E.R. rec that really deconstructs how love functions in society. It’s about how we have kind of made love into a commodity and an economy and we buy things with our love and how we need to break the exchange value of love and have it be something that is inherently anti-capitalist because at its best, or at its most true, love is something that establishes joyful imbalances. I just really like that perspective because we have really lost the plot on love—culturally.” She also recommends a book that really hit her while working on the new album: “If you want a fun novel, read Written on the Body by Jeanette Winterson. I was very inspired by Winterson when I was working on this music, and the narrator of the novel never specifies their gender and it doesn’t matter. That is not the point of the book but it is this very desirous, just a really rich, horny look at love which, yeah, that book is awesome.”
I point out that my original question was about Trump and resistance and what she was essentially saying with her recommendations was “This is how we do it, it’s through love.” And without missing a beat she said, “Yeah, what else?” She knows love is not enough, of course, but it’s the foundation. “I am not saying love is all you need; [that] feels like saying, “Vote!” without anything else. I am very offended when people just say, “Get out and vote” because voting is a farce; you know it’s been gerrymandered and brought to the point of being completely ineffective. But [it’s about] developing a love ethic that’s serious and not just about romance and buying flowers and Valentine’s Day.”
And let’s talk about love and relationships, because her new album is full of relationship anthems. And her lyrical genius is alive and well with lyrics like this line from “For Keeps”: “If the devil’s in the details then god is in the gap in your teeth/You are doing the lord’s work every time you smile at me.” She continues, “But I still miss you when I’m with you because I know we’re not playing for keeps.” It’s so beautiful it will keep floating around in your head. At one point in the interview she said, “Just so you know what I’m doing, there is a pile of beads on the floor. I don’t know where they’re from and I’m just sorting them and I don’t know why. It just helps me pay attention.”
She is so cute, so quirky, so just ahhh, a relief. She cares and listening to someone who cares about others so deeply just really makes you care about them. Here’s to Lucy Dacus.
Top Image Courtesy Of Shervin Lainez
