I do not know why does it feel significant, but I still wish to tell you
2025 has been a year that has felt like a never ending treadmill. Whenever someone asks me how I am, I almost always answer “busy”. Mind occupied with trying to balance the beauty and connection I have the privilege of experiencing in my every day and horrors unfolding in the world , enacted by those in power and out of my reach. Historically I have always found solace in music. With musicians most important to me, I can normally pinpoint the precise moment I fell in love with them. With Buckley, it was “Lover, You Should Have Come Over”, listened to while I was in my teenage bedroom, hearing “Grace” for the first time. With Dylan, I was out on a walk in my empty hometown, listening to a Greatest Hits Compilation and discovering “All Along the Watchtower” and feeling like having discovered some profound truth. With Elliott Smith, it was listening to “Either / Or” late at night, his songwriting connecting to some deep part of me, while I was trying to do my maths homework.
Lucy Dacus was recommended to me by a former colleague, during a casual office chat. It was 2021 and “Home Video” had just come out. I thought I'd give it a go while travelling around London. I was enjoying the album a normal amount until “Brando” came on. It was perfect story-telling across the span of three minutes. It also contained film references, which I always appreciate. So I listened to the album on a loop and grew to like her music, the lyricism that felt more like literary short stories. They were very personal, intimate and vulnerable and spoke to the part of me that spends a lot of time reflecting on the connections we build with others and how those can blossom or shatter, and how that shapes who we are in such fundamental ways. I had the pleasure of seeing her perform live in 2022, but she had not yet entered what I consider my obsessive canon of musicians, where I want to listen to nothing and no one else. This happened a few months later, in 2023, when boygenius released their debut LP. I had the privilege to experience them live three times. I realized that the lyrics she had written were the ones that hit the hardest.
This meant that I spent a lot of time in 2023 and 2024 listening to her music, reading interviews and realizing that her music embodied a radical honesty and vulnerability that I have always admired in musicians. I mostly look to music to provide me with a sense of not being alone, a place of comfort and reassurance. “Home Video” is a beautiful record, reminiscent of coming of age indie films, with its clear articulation of growing up in a Christian environment, grappling with sexuality, and the entanglement of friendship and romance. Her church leaders prevented her from listening to secular music and the complexities of growing up queer while in a very homophobic environment are captured in her song writing. In her Artist in Residence for BBC 6 Music Dacus tells the story of how she was allowed to listen to Sufjan Stevens - a man, who has long been the subject of discussions of whether his music is about Jesus or queer love, with most people concluding it's both.
In terms of the musical quality of her work, it is classic indie, with gentle acoustic strummings in certain songs (e.g. “Bullseye”) and full electric guitar breakdowns at other points. A shining example is her most famous song “Night Shift” which captures the heartbreak of someone wrecking your heart and hoping it shall pass, whilst doing every possible thing to avoid seeing them. “No Burden” and “Historian” leans more into the sound of classic indie alternative rock, but both “Home Video” and “Forever is a Feeling” feel like more gentle records. Yet they still feel like musical growth, as they become even more open and vulnerable, offering very intimate, often painful, parts of Dacus’ life for listeners to discover. The instrumentalisations on “Forever is a Feeling” feel more tender and gentle, with “Talk” being the one song feeling more like those of her earlier records, with its emphasis on guitars. However Dacus’ talent for exploring relationships, connections and emotions in both highly specific yet also universal ways is continuously being developed.
“Forever is a Feeling” is the song-writer’s fourth record and when the first single “Ankles” came out; I listened to it on repeat, thinking it might be my favourite LP of 2025. Upon the first few listens of the album, I felt that it was a bit too poppy, a bit too twee. I missed the more indie rock sound of songs like “Timefighter” and “Strange Torpedo”. Nonetheless over time I grew to love the record as I paid attention to the lyrics. It was an articulation of both the beauty and ache of falling in love, but also falling out of it, of love that never quite came to be and of love that was so intimate that listening to a song about it, “Lost Time”, felt like sneaking into her bedroom and reading Dacus’ diary. This is also the song that I would argue is one of the genuine masterpieces of her whole catalogue, as it brings a fantastic guitar breakdown à la “Night Shift” and combines it with a stunning and raw portrait of her romantic partner.
Dacus’ observational skills provide a specificity to her song-writing. The latest album was inspired by classic art and how people have always used it to capture love, to represent and immortalize it. As she articulates in her New Yorker profile: “All love feels new and one of a kind, and it is. But it is also the most ancient feeling.” In “Ankles” she captures both the horny and the ordinary aspects of a romantic partnership “I want you to show me what you mean/ then help me with the crossword in the morning”. So due to my on-going listening, I ended up falling in love with the album and determined to see her live, as the one festival experience I had had really did not feel like the most meaningful way of seeing her live.
In the spring I bought tickets to four of Dacus’ shows, across Europe -Bristol, London, Amsterdam and Paris, leading to teasing remarks from my friends, who thought it was all a bit much. But I wanted to combine the beauty of her music with exploring art around Europe. In Paris it was Monet, in Amsterdam van Gogh and in Bristol an art exhibition on ideas of gender. Two of the shows were acoustic experiences, Bristol and London, and two were full band experiences. Her setlist also varied from show to show, which I appreciated, as it is nice to not fully predict what an artist might bring.
Dacus has a very grounded and reassuring stage presence. I am now at an age where I find myself to be raising the average age of her audience. In Bristol I ended up talking to a woman and her fourteen year old daughter.. This sometimes leads me to ponder whether I am too old to be in these venues, but I think it’s due to how welcoming her music and art feels to queer people of all ages. Her songs speak to the most gentle, vulnerable and insecure parts of us. During the four shows I called my best friend during “True Blue” twice and cried once during “Modgliani”, whilst thinking of her. During the Amsterdam show I kept thinking of my partner and the love and care found within our partnership. I thought of my friends and the transformative experiences I had shared with them, how they always challenge me and I am always changing, due to them. Never alone, always molded and shaped by someone else. “How lucky are we to have so much to lose?” How lucky indeed. Her music puts you in that beautiful spot of being able to process pain and awe at the same time.
The first show in Bristol was a small church show of a few hundred people and during “Please Stay” I broke down crying, as it is a song about trying to get someone you love to not give up, to stay, cause an idea of them not being on this Earth wrecks you. “go back to school/ go back to sleep/ tell the secret you can’t keep/ begin, be done/ break a vow, make a new one/ call me if you need a friend or never talk to me again/ but please stay” . There are people I love dearly and yet I know that they struggle, but the thought of them not staying hurts too much to ponder. Her acoustic shows let her voice shine and the lyrics come at the forefront of the experience and it just takes that to hit somewhere deep within your soul.
Her latest record also has more strings, and during all of the live performances, both acoustic and full band ones, Phoenix Rousiamanis played the violin and I remember standing in the church in Bristol, mesmerised by her deliberate playing, her visual presence also reminding of an art work from the Pre-Raphaelites.
The full band experiences of Amsterdam and Paris came with accompanying visuals, meant to resemble an art gallery wall. The audiences at her shows were some of the most polite and considerate audiences I had had the pleasure of being in. My heart fills with such joy as I see queer couples existing in spaces explicitly welcoming for them. Being at a Lucy Dacus show feels like being in a safe space, full of people hanging on to every word of the artist as she does the in-between song chatter, trying to figure out what tea she’s drinking and waving their lesbian and rainbow flags proudly. For someone who came out later in her life, these spaces feel liberatory. Everyone there, not hiding, experiencing love and joy.
Attending all these shows felt like useful reminders that there is still so much to live for, to discover and to appreciate, even though it might not feel this way. There is no great answer or solution, but there are spaces and places where we get to build our own utopias, but it is left for us to build them and cherish them. They are not guaranteed, they require effort and care. Dacus’ music is a reminder that care is always there, within the little acts of understanding and tenderness we extend to each other.
stormborns
andulkaphoto
snowghoul
origamiaround
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kianamaiart
