Last night, Lucy Dacus and her band performed the new song, “Hot & Heavy” on CBS’ “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert”. “Hot & Heavy” is the second single from Dacus’ forthcoming 3rd album, ‘Home Video’, coming June 25.
presave / preorder 'Home Video’ : http://lucydacus.ffm.to/homevideo
coming June 25, the new album from Lucy Dacus, ‘Home Video’
produced by Colin Pastore, Jacob Blizard, Jake Finch and Lucy Dacus
presave / preorder : lucydacus.ffm.to/homevideo
(limited pink/marble vinyl available exclusively from the Matador Store
super deluxe pink in blue cloud vinyl available exclusively from Lucy Dacus’ store
limited clear vinyl available exclusively from independent retailers
limited blue vinyl available via Spotify Fans First )
‘Home Video’ : a Foreword
There are a thousand truisms about home and childhood, none of them true but all of them honest. It’s natural to want to tidy those earliest memories into a story so palatable and simple that you never have to read again. A home video promises to give your memories back with a certificate of fact— but the footage isn’t the feeling. Who is just out of frame? What does the soft focus obscure? How did the recording itself change the scene?
Some scrutinize the past and some never look back and Lucy Dacus, a lifelong writer and close reader, has long been the former sort. “The past doesn’t change,” Dacus said on a video call during that interminable winter of video calls. “Even if a memory is of a time I didn’t feel safe, there’s safety in looking at it, in its stability.”
This new gift from Dacus, 'Home Video’, her third album, was built on an interrogation of her coming-of-age years in Richmond, Virginia. Many songs start the way a memoir might—“In the summer of ’07 I was sure I’d go to heaven, but I was hedging my bets at VBS”—and all of them have the compassion, humor, and honesty of the best autobiographical writing. Most importantly and mysteriously, this album displays Dacus’s ability to use the personal as portal into the universal. “I can’t hide behind generalizations or fiction anymore,” Dacus says, though talking about these songs, she admits, makes her ache.
While there’s a nostalgic tint to much of Dacus’s work, the obliquely told stories in past songs are depicted here with greater specificity. “Triple Dog Dare” recounts young, queer love complicated and forbidden by religion. The toxic relationship depicted in “Partner in Crime” is filled with pining, deceit, and meeting curfew. (“My heart’s on my sleeve/ it’s embarrassing/ the pulpy thing, beating.”) “Christine” is an elegiac ballad about a close friend vanishing into an inhibiting relationship.
As is often the case with Dacus, these songs are a study in contrast. In “Hot & Heavy ” she sings powerfully about blushing and diffidence, while the song “Thumbs” contains an elegant fantasy about the brutal murder of a close friend’s no-good father. After performing “Thumbs” during the nearly nonstop tours for her first two albums, it quickly became a white whale to Dacus fans, who have been counting the days until its release just as we’ve all awaited the end of this endless quarantine.
While all that touring made Lucy long to re-root in her hometown, her sudden acclaim filled Richmond with funhouse distortions of herself. People she didn’t know were looking at her like they knew her better than she knew herself. Strangers showed up at her front door. “You used to be so sweet,” she sings on the opening track, “now you’re a firecracker on a crowded street.” That truism, both true and false—you can’t go home again—seemed to taunt her at the very time she needed home the most.
In August 2019, after a too much touring then a month of silence, it was time to go back to Trace Horse Studio in Nashville—Jacob Blizard, Collin Pastore, and Jake Finch, her loyal friends and collaborators were at her side again. Dacus’s boygenius bandmates, Phoebe Bridgers and Julien Baker sang a loving chorus on “Please Stay” and “Going Going Gone” while each recorded solo songs during the same session. Dacus’s resulting record—full of arrhythmic heartbeat percussion and backgrounds of water-warped pipe organ— was mixed by Shawn Everett and mastered by Bob Ludwig.
Loyal Dacus listeners may notice that the melodies here are lower and more contained, at times feeling as intimate as a whisper. The vulnerability of these songs, so often about the intense places where different sorts of love meet and warp, required this approach. “When you told me ‘bout your first time, a soccer player at the senior high,” she sings in “Cartwheel”, “I felt my body crumple to the floor. Betrayal like I’d never felt before.” Yet in “Partner in Crime”, Dacus marries content and form in a strikingly different way, using uncharacteristic autotune in a song about duplicity and soft coercion.
That 'Home Video’ arrives at the end of this locked down, fearful era seems as preordained as the messages within. “I don’t necessarily think that I’m supposed to understand the songs just because I made them,” Dacus says into a screen, “I feel like there’s this person who has been in me my whole life and I’m doing my best to represent them.” After more than a year of being homebound, in a time when screens and video calls were sometimes our only form of contact, looking backward was a natural habit for many. If we haven’t learned it already, this album is a gorgeous example of the transformative power of vulnerability. Dacus’s voice, both audible and on the page, has a healer’s power to soothe and ground and reckon.
—Catherine Lacey, February 2021, Chicago, IL
Home Video Tracklist
01. Hot & Heavy
02. Christine
03. First Time
04. VBS
05. Cartwheel
06. Thumbs
07. Going Going Gone
08. Partner in Crime
09. Brando
10. Please Stay
11. Triple Dog Dare
From Lucy Dacus:
RICHMOND we are ~ f i n a l l y ~ playing a hometown show following the release of Historian. We’re playing a spot that is very special to me- Brown’s Island on June 28th for Friday Cheers with my angel friend Deau Eyes opening up.
I used to come here all the time, with friends or solo, to sing or talk or dance in front of an empty field surrounded by water. Feels full circle, thanks in advance ❤️
(Lucy Dacus photo by Dustin Condren)
On March 2, Matador is releasing the hotly anticipated 2nd album from Richmond, VA’s Lucy Dacus, ‘Historian’, the followup to her unanimously hailed 2016 debut, 'No Burden’ that established her as one of modern music’s top new voices & songwriters. The album’s first single, “Night Shift”, can be heard above.
'Historian’ is a remarkably assured 10-track statement of intent that finds Dacus unafraid to take on the big questions — the life-or-death reckonings, and the ones that just feel that way. It’s a record full of bracing realizations, tearful declarations and moments of hard-won peace, expressed in lyrics that feel destined for countless yearbook quotes and first tattoos.
Dacus and her band recorded the album in Nashville last March, re-teaming with 'No Burden’ producer Collin Pastore, and mixed it a few months later with John Congleton. The sound they created, with substantial input from multi-instrumentalist and live guitarist Jacob Blizard, is far richer and fuller than the debut — an outward flowering of dynamic, living, breathing rock and roll. Dacus’ remarkable sense of melody and composition are the driving force throughout, giving 'Historian’ the immersive feel of an album made by an artist in full command of her powers, on a new level of truth-telling and melodic grace.
The past year, with its electoral disasters and other assorted heartbreaks, has been a rough one for many of us, Dacus included. She found solace in crafting a thoughtful narrative arc for Historian, writing a concept album about cautious optimism in the face of adversity, with thematic links between songs that reveal themselves on repeat listens — touching on everything from systemic racism to creative burnout to the death of her grandmother. “It starts out dark and ends hopeful, but it gets darker in between; it goes to the deepest, darkest, place and then breaks,” she explains. “What I’m trying to say throughout the album is that hope survives, even in the face of the worst stuff.”
Global touring in support of 'Historian’ kicks off on release date at Brooklyn’s Music Hall Of Williamsburg. The album is available for preorder now on the format of your choice.
Tracklist :
1. Night Shift
2. Addictions
3. The Shell
4. Nonbeliever
5. Yours & Mine
6. Body To Flame
7. Timefighter
8. Next Of Kin
9. Pillar Of Truth
10. Historians
stream “Night Shift”
(Pre-orders from The Matador Store will include ten postcards with individual art by ten different artists. Each postcard is inspired by one of the tracks off of 'Historian’)
Tour Dates (on sale Friday, December 15)
Friday, March 2 Music Hall of Williamsburg, Brooklyn NY
Wednesday, March 7 The Southern, Charlottesville VA
Thursday, March 8 Pour House, Charleston SC
Friday, March 9 The Earl Atlanta GA
Saturday, March 10 The High Watt, Nashville TN
Monday, March 19 Valley Bar, Phoenix AZ
Tuesday, March 20 Club Congress, Tucson AZ
Wednesday, March 21 The Casbah, San Diego CA
Thursday, March 22 Teragram Ballroom, Los Angeles CA
Friday, March 23 The Crepe Place, Santa Cruz CA
Saturday, March 24 The Rickshaw Stop, San Francisco CA
Monday, March 26 Doug Fir Lounge, Portland OR
Tuesday, March 27 Biltmore Cabaret, Vancouver BC
Wednesday, March 28 Tractor Tavern, Seattle WA
Friday, March 30 Urban Lounge, Salt Lake City UT
Saturday, March 31 Globe Hall, Denver CO
Monday, April 2 Reverb Lounge, Omaha NE
Wednesday, April 4 7th Street Entry, Minneapolis MN
Thursday, April 5 High Noon Saloon, Madison WI
Friday, April 6 Empty Bottle, Chicago IL
Saturday, April 7 The HI-FI, Indianapolis IN
Sunday, April 8 The Basement, Columbus OH
Monday, April 9 Horseshoe Tavern, Toronto ON
Wednesday, April 11 The Sinclair, Cambridge MA
Friday, April 13 Johnny Brenda’s, Philadelphia PA
Saturday, April 14 Rock & Roll Hotel, Washington DC
Thursday, April 19 Bodega, Nottingham UK
Friday, April 20 The Hug and Pint, Glasgow UK
Saturday, April 21 Gulliver’s, Manchester UK
Thursday, April 26 The Hope and Ruin, Brighton UK
Friday, April 27 Espace B, Paris FR
Monday, April 30 Stengade, Copenhagen DK
Tuesday, May 1 Prinzenbar Hamburg DE
Thursday, May 3 Blue Shell, Cologne DE
Friday, May 4 Sugar Factory, Amsterdam NE
Lucy Dacus online :
slumberlandrecords