Album Review: Lucy Dacus Brings Adult Wisdom To Her Teenage Exploits on ‘Home Video’
The Philly musician tells two stories at once: one in which she experiences her adolescence as it happens, and another in which she meditates on it as an adult who’s grown past its heightened emotions.
Written by Felix Kalvesmaki
Photo courtesy of Matador Records
Lucy Dacus walks listeners through a museum of her adolescence on her summer-y third record, Home Video. Ironically meant for a fall release, the Virginia-born singer-songwriter pushed back its release until 2021 for, like, a pandemic or something, working piecemeal on the recording process remotely with her co-producers after writing all of the tracks herself.
Dacus, at least, braved that unfamiliarity with people she knew she could trust. She’s been working with the same producers, including Jacob Blizard and Colin Pastore, since her debut No Burden. Blizard, Camille Faulkner and Jake Finch are just some of the musicians credited with backing Dacus’ compositions on her third go around. Apparently, Dacus has been keeping the same company since high school; in the album’s liner notes, she states that she’s grateful that her suburban upbringing meant making recordings in Pastore’s bedroom, as opposed to “going bowling or something.” Perhaps it’s because of the close relationships Dacus maintains with her collaborators that Home Video feels so vivid. While the singer-songwriter is doing the most direct storytelling with her omnipresent sage lyricism, even the instrumentation of this album is marinated in nostalgia, like the people involved in its additional guitars, synths, and soundscapes have been hearing these stories for years too.
This album, in a way, is an exercise in world-building. Each story on the LP is a peek into Dacus’ experience growing up in Richmond, Virginia, and by the end of the record, it feels like the listener’s met everyone in town. The wistful “Hot & Heavy” and the gentle “Christine,” which open the album, explore Dacus’ relationships with some of her close friends and her perspective on them. On the latter track, she imagines objecting to a wedding and tossing a shoe at the altar, ultimately resolving she’d rather lose the titular character’s respect than watch her marry a man she won’t be happy with.
She used her childhood journals as inspiration for this record, and it makes sense — this sounds like a catastrophizing scenario somebody would scribble onto a page in a frenzy. What if they get married? What if my friend is unhappy forever? This isn’t to say that Dacus is a childish narrator across Home Video, though. It feels like there’s two Lucys at once sometimes; one is 16 and the other is 26. This kind of shifting perspective is essential to both the nostalgia the album evokes, and the emotional strength of having grown past volatile teenage emotions and dramatics. Much like Fleetwood Mac’s “Landslide,” it’ll hit you differently in high school than it will in college, and so forth. When Dacus stands firm in opposition to her friend’s hypothetical marriage, there’s a maturity to that confidence too.
But there’s more to this album than the beauty and pain of growing older. Dacus meditates on religion several times throughout the record, possibly most notably on “VBS.” Short for “Vacation Bible School,” the singer reminisces on the way her former faith backdropped her teenage years to bursts of godly organ, and eventually, a staticky, thrashing heavy metal breakdown following lyrics about “playing Slayer at full volume” to shut out unwanted thoughts. A closer reading of its verses reveals some genuine religious tension: “When I tell you you were born and you are here for a reason / You are not convinced the reason is a good one,” Dacus croons in one line. There’s even some emotional potency to the line about huffing spices for psychedelic effects: “Back in the cabin, snorting nutmeg in your bunk bed / You were waiting for a revelation of your own.” We see these kids stumbling around a Bible camp in the midst of spiritual crisis, and it’s harrowing and painful.
There’s a lot of pain and angst on this record, but there isn’t any aggrandized wallowing. The album’s lead single, “Thumbs,” features little instrumentation beyond Dacus’ own voice and whispering, droning synth chords. She has a penchant for combining her indie-rock songwriting with some heavy instrumentation, and it could’ve been very easy for her to play it up with this one. The chorus goes: “I would kill him / If you let me / I would kill him / Quick and easy.” The third verse sees her imagining “her thumbs on the irises” of her friend’s abusive father, “Pressing in / Until they burst.” But it’s restrained. Lucy’s voice is beautifully controlled, even in the crescendo of the song when she ultimately proclaims her friend doesn’t owe her father shit, “even if he said you did.” The choice to go quiet for a genuinely disturbing track like this one makes it all the more chilling.
Photo courtesy of Matador Records
The room is softer and gentler still on “Going Going Gone,” a self-professed campfire jam with some familiar names in the lineup: Dacus’ third producer Jake Finch is in the mix, along with her boygenius bandmates Phoebe Bridgers and Julien Baker with Baker’s dog Beans in tow. Mitski’s also around the flame with her longtime collaborator Patrick Hyland. Their voices all blend beautifully with Dacus’, making for a lovely little ditty.
The back-end of this record is pretty stacked — the cleverly titled “Partner In Crime” is about an underage Dacus dating an older person. She keeps her wits about her, but admits to lying about her age: “It's not your fault, it's mine / Let the record show I walked in on my own.” From a legal perspective, she acknowledges him as a criminal, but her feelings were more complicated than that. It’s a brilliant expression of a very touchy subject. The use of autotune somehow makes the insistent questioning of “Do you love me, do you love me not?” more emotional. “Brando” is a reminder of how goddamn witty the singer-songwriter can be. “You called me 'cerebral' / I didn't know what you meant / But now I do, would it have killed you / To call me pretty instead?” she asks. Then, she continues to take her subject down a peg: “I'm in a second story window / And you're yelling at me, "Stella!" / And I'm laughing 'cause you think you're Brando / But you'll never come close.”
“Please Stay” completes a trilogy of sorts. Dacus appeared alongside Julien Baker on Phoebe Bridgers’ 2020 album Punisher, for the track “Graceland Too.” Bridgers and Dacus then guested in “Favor” from Baker’s 2021 effort, Little Oblivions. With Dacus’ boygenius bandmates contributing three-part harmonies to her penultimate number on this record, the musicians (and friends) have essentially made a second EP’s worth of songs with one another to follow up their six-track debut from 2018. It’s an endearing nod to their bond, and here together they sound as pure as ever. The lyricism is sweet for a track featuring three artists who’ve meditated on mental health issues in their music before: “Call me if you need a friend or never talk to me again / But please stay.”
The final track sees Dacus fantasizing about a friend she was barred from seeing during her freshman year of high school. “Your mama read my palm / Shе wouldn't tell me what it was she saw / But after that, you weren't allowed to spend the night.” The two friends grow apart from here, but it’s not where the singer lets the story end. In her head, she and her friend make a break for it, and end up going missing.
Dacus ties the final bow on this album by shifting her narrative focus to the mother who saw it coming in this fantastical scenario. Dacus and her friend end up on milk jugs, and her friend’s mother comes to a dark resolve in her mourning of her child. “Your mama was right, and through the grief / Can't fight the feeling of relief / Nothing worse could happen now.”
Her music hits square in the chest, describing the most gruesome of emotions, memories, and fantasies from puberty and beyond with an ease of somebody sipping rosé on her couch. Enhanced by tight, creative musicianship, Home Video is novelistic storytelling from start to finish. And like wine, it may best be enjoyed ten years from now.