“I have an obsession with the idea that things change, just because things are always changing in my life. I guess I get taught that lesson over and over,” muses songwriter Lucy Dacus. “I don’t know if you’ve ever read Octavia Butler, but at the beginning of Parable of the Sower, she’s like, ‘God is change.’ And I think that’s a good definition. I think you need to stay grounded in the idea that everything changes—and that you aren’t going to be able to stop that.”
Dacus is speaking via Zoom from her Los Angeles home, appearing very grounded as she sits in her kitchen snacking on a bowl of berries. (“I apologize, I realized I hadn’t had breakfast, so I’m just eating,” she says sheepishly.) But of course, to say her life has changed in the last two years—during which her indie supergroup with Phoebe Bridgers and Julien Baker, boygenius, became a GRAMMY-sweeping, Coachella-dominating, critics’-lists-topping sensation—would be a massive understatement.
Photography: Carianne Older Cover Design: Jerome Curchod Lighting Design: Jesse Tam Hair: Caitlin Wronski Make up: Caroline Hernandez Styling: Ashley Furnival Location: George’s Lighting Plus Shot on: Cinestill 400D Film Developed at: Gelatin Labs
“We’d decided it would be just one year. We were like, ‘OK, 2023: We put out this record, we tour it, done,’” Dacus says of boygenius’ seemingly shocking decision, announced just two days before they took home three trophies at last year’s GRAMMY Awards ceremony, to go on indefinite hiatus. “So, the GRAMMYs was actually an extension of our boundaries. That was just basically like, ‘Alright, after the GRAMMYs, it’s over.’ And sure, we could’ve toured more. It would’ve been fun. But I like that we just told each other, ‘This is it.’ And then we all have our own things to do. It keeps our friendship about each other, and not about business.
“We didn’t know we were going to be going out on top, as one might say, but that was such an amazing ride—and what a way to end it,” Dacus continues. “That pace was insane. How much we were doing was not sustainable. I think since we knew it was only one year, we said yes to a ton of stuff and had all of these crazy experiences. But if we were like, ‘Ohhh, we have to sustain this forever,’ we would’ve had to adopt a pace that was much slower.” In her down time since the boygenius break, Dacus, who moved to LA in October 2023, has been savoring a slower pace of existence. “I love sitting in my house and going on walks and going to my little favorite restaurants, and I have a couple of friends I keep in touch with. It’s a very quiet life that I really enjoy right now,” she says.
But now she’s about to release Forever Is a Feeling, her fourth solo album and first since boygenius’ breakout success. One might assume that the stakes and expectations are high for this record (the Forever track “Come Out” snarkily mentions sitting in a record label’s “boardroom full of old men guessing what the kids are getting into”), but Dacus seems mostly unfazed by such industry concerns. “I guess that’s not a fear that changes how I act; I don’t think about that stuff when I’m making music,” she shrugs. “Luckily, when I’m writing and recording, I feel very hyper-focused on, ‘What does the song need? What by its own metrics and my own taste needs to happen?’”
“I guess change is destruction in creation. It’s opting into change, going with the flow of reality, and not forcing yourself to be stagnant.”
However, Dacus doesn’t mind talking about boygenius while doing interviews for her new record. “As if I’m not proud to be in boygenius?” she laughs incredulously. “I think it would be extreme ego to be like, ‘No, don’t talk about boygenius!’ Also, I like that record, and I love Phoebe and Julien and I miss them. Honestly, talking about them feels like a huge relief, because it’s easier than talking about myself. But the way I see it, I had a career before boygenius, and I don’t feel like I’m just ‘Lucy from boygenius.’ So it just makes me sad for [other artists] when they’re like, ‘Don’t mention my old band.’ It’s like, ‘Man, that must’ve been one messy breakup!’ I guess I’m just grateful that boygenius wasn’t a messy breakup.”
On the contrary, Dacus is now in a contentedly committed relationship with Baker, recently confirming rumors of their romance that have been circulating online for years. But messy breakups and the general concept of transitoriness are still recurring themes on the aptly titled Forever Is a Feeling, which Dacus describes as a “crossfade between a breakup album and a falling-in-love album and a reckoning-with-change album” about “sex and relationships and romance” and “accepting the temporality of things in love.”
Dacus says Forever’s songs are “definitely autobiographical” as much as they are “composites” of other people’s experiences—which means boygenius fans will no doubt be poring over the album’s lyrics, trying to figure out which are about Baker. Dacus has acknowledged that “Most Wanted Man” (in which she sings, “I just wanna make you happy / Will you let me spend a lifetime trying?”) is about their relationship, but other tracks’ inspirations remain a mystery. “Maybe because it’s unspecific writing, it feels like there’s this remove where I can be candid,” she says. “Even though, specifically, anybody in my life is going to listen to it.”
An intensely private person, Dacus answers rather unspecifically when questioned about an eyebrow-raising statement in a Forever Is a Feeling press release about having to “make peace with the price of the love she wanted” and how she “did destroy a really beautiful life.” Was it her life that she “destroyed” during the making of this album? An ex-lover’s? Both? “Well, I guess change is destruction in creation. So, it’s opting into change, going with the flow of reality, and not forcing yourself to be stagnant. And I guess I was the one who was opting in to change,” she ponders. “It’s not that my life was miserable; I just saw this other life that felt like reality and where my heart was, and I don’t know…it’s a hard decision for anyone. But it was worth it, ultimately.”
“It just makes me sad for other artists when they’re like, ‘Don’t mention my old band.’ It’s like, ‘Man, that must’ve been one messy breakup!’”
Dacus wrote Forever between 2022 and 2024, and started recording it in spring 2023—right in the middle of the boygenius whirlwind, and while her personal life was in flux, as well. “There was definitely just distance, meaning literal space, but also with time and attention,” she says of her struggle to nurture and maintain relationships while boygenius’ promotional cycle was in full spin. “I think that’s part of why it feels like my life is always changing. I’m always moving around, so I definitely am not as present as I wish I could be for all the people I love. And this is beyond romance—this is with friendships and family, too. So, yeah, that was part of the whirlwind. But what’s good about always moving around is I feel like I’m always able to have perspective.”
While Dacus’ previous solo album, 2021’s nostalgic Home Video, was a reflection on her small-town Virginia adolescence, Forever Is a Feeling is decidedly worldly and adult. “It’s definitely not about childhood,” the 29-year-old chuckles. “I don’t really control what I write, so I have to analyze it after it’s done. And I think that my present-day life when I was writing Home Video was not that inspiring, so I was like, ‘Maybe this is a good time to go back and reflect and process some things.’ But then for this record, my recent times have been so rich and inspiring that there was a lot to pull from.”
Dacus, who was raised Christian in conservative Mechanicsville, Virginia (“My mom is the one person in the neighborhood who doesn’t have a Trump sign in their yard,” she notes), admits that she’s still skittish about unleashing sexually charged love songs like “Best Guess,” with its swooning lines about “zipping your dress,” “kissing your neck,” and “tracing your tanline.” And then there’s the uncharacteristically, unabashedly lusty “Ankles,” in which she alluringly coos, “Pull me by the ankles to the edge of the bed and take me like you do in your dreams,” and “Bite me on the shoulder, pull my hair, and let me touch you where I want to—there, there, there, there, there.”
“Most of my [previous] love songs were for friends or were yearning for people, not about active experiences of romance. So, yeah, it makes me nervous!” Dacus giggles. “I still know some people who blush at the thought of acknowledging that we’re all sexual beings, and I mean, I actually say the word ‘sex’ in ‘Talk.’ Which is weird! I was like, ‘This feels so weird, not classy at all,’ or something like that. But also, that song is about sex becoming scary with somebody—like, what happens when you fall out of love, and you don’t want to be having sex anymore.”
“I still know some people who blush at the thought of acknowledging that we’re all sexual beings, and I mean, I actually say the word ‘sex’ in ‘Talk.’ Which is weird!”
“Talk” is arguably the most direct gut-punch among Forever’s breakup songs, with Dacus lamenting, “Why can’t we talk anymore? / We used to talk for hours.” She says its all-too-relatable account of passion burnout is “eerie to me. I like that it feels just angry and frustrated, and it goes from these silences to this buzzed-out, yelling aspect. It’s about when you feel like you’re invisible to somebody and they want things from you, but they don’t want you, and you want things from them but not them. It’s realizing not just that I’m invisible and you don’t love me for who I am, but that I also want what you’re not giving me. It’s very humbling, ultimately, to realize, ‘Oh, I want more than you have to give, and that’s kind of selfish, in a way.’”
Despite Dacus’ currently stable love life, much of Forever Is a Feeling is seemingly about what could’ve been, what almost was, or what briefly was but—just like boygenius’ chaotic year—wasn’t meant to be sustained. Dacus croons, in her distinctively buttery-but-broken contralto, of doomed yet still fondly remembered nights in mezzanine cheap seats, dirty sheets, and expense-account $700 hotel rooms; of road trips in 1993 Grand Cherokees; of furtive, stolen moments in stairwells and at after-hours parties. And another theme throughout is that love is almost always worth it, even if—or maybe because—it doesn’t last.
On “Bullseye,” a haunting folk duet with one of her favorite artists, Irish songwriter Hozier, Dacus wistfully sings, “Found some of your stuff at my new house / Packed it on accident when I was moving out / It’s probably wrong to think of them as your gifts to me / More like victims of my sentimentality.” Another sharp-eyed, sharp-knife-to-the-heart observation appears on “Lost Time”: “Nothing lasts forever but let’s see how far we get / So when it comes my turn to lose you I’ll have made the most of it.” Even the sumptuously string-laden “Big Deal,” one of the album’s most straightforwardly romantic odes, features the unflinchingly honest central confession, “We both know that it would never work.” “After I write a song, I kind of decide, ‘Is this worth sharing?’ And any song that you hear has gone through that process. So I think it’s all been worth it,” Dacus asserts.
However, she does grapple with one self-villainizing Forever track, the twinkling, jazzy piano ballad “Limerence,” on which she confesses, “I’m thinking about breaking your heart someday soon / And if I do, I’ll be breaking mine too.” “‘Limerence’ captures a state of unease and cowardice and fear and discomfort, where I’m kind of brought back there when I hear it. It just really makes me feel bad,” Dacus reveals. “The first lyric is ‘Natalie’s explaining limerence between taking hits from a blunt,’ and that’s Natalie [Mering] from Weyes Blood, which I think is funny. She was just explaining what limerence is at this party, and in this scene someone else is playing video games and I’m just eating popcorn, overwhelmed, unable to engage. So, on the one hand, it’s just the literal detail of what was happening. But then, if you listen to the song, I’m realizing that what I have for my partner has kind of been this falling out of love. I want aspects of someone, but the whole thing feels bad. And it’s like, what do you do next when you realize that?
“I’ve been having these kind of boring realizations where it’s like, ‘Oh, love is not enough.’ And that the idea that a relationship is supposed to last forever, and whoever deviates from that is the ‘bad guy,’ is not cool,” Dacus continues. “Because the thing is, who is having these black-and-white experiences? Ultimately in relationships, there’s usually pain across the board. And there’s usually love across the board, even when people are like, ‘Fuck them!’ I think a lot of people say things like that as a mantra, to try and get their heart out of it. But yeah, people who love each other hurt each other. And that’s just a part of life. I just want a little more leniency on people; I just wish that there weren’t so many legalistic views of love. I still love everyone who I’ve ever dated, to some degree, even the ones who I’m really pissed at and the ones who treated me so bad. I still really want them to have really good lives. What I’ve learned is you don’t get to keep everyone in your life. And who I do have in my life, I’m very lucky and grateful for that.”
“[Forever Is a Feeling is] kind of like an unopened love letter, where I’ve just written it and I’ve slid it across the table, and I’m really curious to see if my point is going to come across.”
Now that Forever Is a Feeling—which additionally features contributions from Blake Mills, Madison Cunningham, Bartees Strange, Jay Som’s Melina Duterte, and, of course, Bridgers and Baker—will soon be released for all of Dacus’ fans, friends, and former flames to hear, Dacus admits, “There’s that little feeling of, ‘Are people going to get this?’ It’s kind of like an unopened love letter, where I’ve just written it and I’ve slid it across the table, and I’m really curious to see if my point is going to come across.” Ironically, Dacus’ album all about impermanence will surely solidify her status as a solo star with staying power, but again, she’s not worried about forever, or even about what comes next.
“There’s a line in the song ‘Most Wanted Man’ about ‘living the dream before we fully pass our prime,’ which I feel like I’m so aware of,” she admits. “It feels like this weird miracle that I have this job. You’re not hired by anybody, you’re not necessarily fired by anybody. You’re just floating in it for an amorphous amount of time, and you never know when people are going to stop being interested. So I’m just trying to enjoy my career, in kind of the same way that I’m talking about love on this record: just for what it is, when it is. And if it passes, it’ll have been a wild ride.” FL
