Lucy Dacus’ ‘Home Video’ Really Is As Good As Everyone Says It Is
The most devastating listen of 2021 is here.
Over the last few years, Lucy Dacus has built up a reputation for telling the truth.
Emerging with No Burden back in 2016, Dacus combined a scraped clean guitar sound with blistering honesty. “Lately, I’ve been feeling like the odd man out,” she howls on ‘I Don’t Wanna Be Funny Anymore’, one of the songs that made her name. “I hurt my friends saying things I don’t mean out loud.”
This has always been her prerogative, then; mining the mundanities of what it means to be alive and finding seams poetry there, whether it be wondering about the nature of a broken relationship while a rebound spits in your mouth, as on ‘Night Shift’, or lying awake in the middle of the night and feeling trapped still in childhood, as on ‘Addictions’.
But Home Video, Dacus’ first album in three years, takes this truth-telling to the next step. Whereas once Dacus revealed the world through metaphor, here she speaks plainly, calling to mind the simple, direct verse of Louise Gluck or Ron Padgett. There are no similes to hide behind anymore; there is only a finger, pointing; a singer-songwriter saying in a clear, firm voice, “this is how it feels for me. Does it also feel this way for you?”
Nowhere is that clearer than on ‘Thumbs’, a miniature masterpiece that has been part of Dacus’ live set for years. A short story of sorts, in which Dacus considers killing the absent father of a friend, each line has a clean twist, like a stiletto shooting out from its handle. “You hung up the phone and I asked you what was wrong,” Dacus murmurs. “Your dad has come to town, he’d like to meet/I said ‘You don’t have to see him’/But for whatever reason you can’t tell him no.”
Elsewhere, on ‘Please Stay’, Dacus assembles a catalogue of things that a lover has left behind; empty shoes; discarded keys; unread books. The song is an architectural blueprint — a kind of positioning, in which Dacus places her feet in the middle of a room and then lists, sadly, what she sees.
In its simplicity, the song calls to mind Philip Larkin, and his work ‘Home is So Sad’, in which the poet returns to his childhood home and lists its assembly of everyday items, filled now with portentous weight — “You can see how it was,” Larkin says of the space. “Look at the pictures and the cutlery/The music in the piano stool/That vase.”
Like Larkin, Dacus is returning to something. Home Video is, as its title implies, a collection of recollections, shot through with the bright light of nostalgia, peppered with teenage declarations of love and teenage heartbreaks. “I’ll be lucky if I’m your third wife,” she sings on ‘Brando’. “That’s only something you would say in the car.”
Dacus’ memory is as good as her songwriting — she can call to mind the sight of dimming lamplights, parallel suns; the plucked petals of a he-loves-me-he-loves-me-not flower, fallen to the floor.
Home Video is a collection of recollections…peppered with teenage declarations of love and teenage heartbreaks.
Yet her plain-speaking should not be confused with Dacus having all of the answers. One of the joys of Home Video are the moments in which Dacus shrugs. On ‘Please Stay’, she considers, futilely, literally stopping her departing lover from leaving the room; on ‘Cartwheel’, she sits silent on a curb next to a friend, useless as a bag of table legs. “What to say when there is not a word?” she wonders, quietly.
And so it would be a mistake to think that there is some catharsis here; that by explaining the world as she sees it, Dacus has pointed herself in some new, brighter direction. By listing her genealogies — by putting her histories into order — she has not devised a plan for the rest of her days. She has merely taken account. Sometimes, that is enough.
Dacus shares this too with Gluck. At the end of the latter’s poem ‘Matins’, a work about searching for a four-leaf clover that might provide some sense of purpose, Gluck finds her hands as “empty as the first note”; the direction forward obscured. And then, suddenly, comes the realisation: “Or was the point always to continue without a sign?” Gluck wonders. Dacus’ hands are empty too. Dacus’ question is the same. “Can’t fight the feeling of relief,” Dacus sings on ‘Triple Dog Dare’, and then the album flicks into darkness around her, just like that.
Joseph Earp is a staff writer at Music Junkee. He Tweets @JosephOEarp.
Photo Credit: Ebru Yildiz