Lucy Dacus: Historian

Lucy Dacus has a warm, sonorous voice, the kind of voice that rings out like a bugle over dialed-up amps, the kind of voice that can lull you into feeling safe even when she’s singing about heartbreak, abjection, and death. Her second album, Historian, builds on the foundation set by her first, the lyrically clever and musically robust No Burden, which caught ears at Matador shortly after its release in 2016. As Historian adds new elements to Dacus’ music—strings, horns, vocal effects, and spoken word samples appear here alongside guitars, drums, and bass—it also finds the Virginia songwriter plumbing new thematic depths and broadening her stage. The album begins with a breakup and climaxes with the death of a loved one, two separate events that Dacus integrates into the same story. She doesn’t merely reckon with loss or paint a portrait of grief; Historian digs deeper than that. It’s an album about the way people carry each other through time.

It’s tempting to compare Dacus to fellow Matador signee Julien Baker. The two artists are friends, they’re both exceptionally strong lyricists, and they both moved from a tentative but impressive debut record to a full-fledged follow-up. They complement each other, but their work sits on different planes. Baker’s songs look inward, framing the self as a portal to God and the broader world. Dacus’ songs tend to survey the world first, then try to situate the self within it, to make connections between the environment and the inner experience of being alive.

A rich cast of characters flits through Historian. There’s the bad lover (and soon-to-be-ex) who’s the recipient of the deliciously barbed line “you don’t deserve what you don’t respect” on “Night Shift.” There’s the friend who casts aside the life they’ve always known in order to find meaning on “Nonbeliever.” There’s Dacus’ grandmother, whose death the songwriter illustrates on the resplendent “Pillar of Truth,” the album’s emotional core. “I am weak looking at you/A pillar of truth turning to dust,” Dacus repeats throughout the song. At times, she seems to switch places with her grandmother, describing the death with first-person pronouns as if she were the one at the end of her life, looking up at her family from her deathbed. Then she snaps back to herself, and all the life she still has left.

Dacus often sings with a wry edge to her voice, as if she both does and doesn’t believe the words coming out of her mouth. The bolstered instrumentation on Historian doesn’t iron out that nuance into blank sincerity; when the music swells, the irony and fear and the slight tint of humor on Dacus’ voice swell too. The density of affect in the music means that it can take some time to unravel and expose itself fully. Historian’s big band moments grab you first. Then, over time, you hear quavers of uncertainty on lines like “I am at peace with my death/I can go back to bed.”

That gradual unfolding is one of Historian’s many delights. It’s not an easy album to wear out. It lasts, and it should, given that so many of its lyrics pick at time, and the way time condenses around deep emotional attachments to other people. The album grapples with hope, too, something Dacus believes “is the most powerful force that humans can interact with.” But she doesn’t conceive of hope as a kind of optimism or a sunny disposition. She sees it as a relationship to time, a way of negotiating with the future, a vessel for moving forward.

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