NEW ALBUMS
LUCY DACUS
Home Video MATADOR 8/10
Virginian songwriter finds universal truths in autobiographical memories.
By Lisa-Marie Ferla
Lucy Dacus: sharing her stories with us
EBRU YILDIZ
IN 2019, Lucy Dacus marked seven significant national holidays (including Valentine’s Day, Christmas and Bruce Springsteen’s birthday) with a new song. The resulting EP, her last formal release to date, skewed towards covers. But, as those songs were being released, she was also working on her most inward-looking project yet.
Recorded at the same Nashville studio and with many of the same collaborators, as 2018’s Historian, Home Video is Dacus at her most autobiographical and lyrically direct. Its 11 tracks draw from her youth in Richmond, Virginia – lost friendships, fierce loyalties, Christian youth groups, park bench make-out sessions – with the specificity of contemporary diary entries or, yes, dusty old family videos. “My heart’s on my sleeve, it’s embarrassing”, Dacus sings on one track, “the pulpy thing, beating”.
The turn inward, says Dacus, was partly prompted by the acclaim that followed her last album, and that same year’s team-up with Julien Baker and Phoebe Bridgers as boygenius (the pair provide backing vocals on Home Video, as Dacus did on each of her friends’ recent career-bests). More attention meant people “projecting their ideas of who I was onto me”, she says, her identity “publicly observed and reflected” in press profiles and interviews.