Interview Lucy Dacus: True Romance

The ways in which the human body has been represented historically has varied greatly, with each different period having different expectations about what people – particularly women – should look like. “I’m not a sample size, so people have made all sorts of comments about my body to me directly or online and I think I fit an older standard of beauty, which is part of the era I’m trying to evoke.” There’s an obvious vulnerability in the way Lucy presents herself on the cover, which translates throughout the album, its depiction of fantasy morphing into tangible connection.

“How lucky are we to have so much to lose?” she muses on ‘Ankles’, a song which flirts with giving into intimate dreams, her desires manifesting via a bed of pulsating violins. There’s an openness here that shows off a whole other dimension to her songwriting. 2021’s ‘Home Video’ saw Lucy looking back to examine past relationships doomed to never go anywhere. By comparison, ‘Forever Is A Feeling’ couldn’t be any more present: between Autumn 2022 and summer last year, her time writing took in a breakup, move across the US - and (as recently revealed in her profile with The New Yorker) falling in love with her boygenius bandmate Julien Baker.

For the first time she was writing about relationships in real time. “No love I’ve ever written about before has purely been a love song,” she says. “Whereas on this record, it’s about the present day, feeling in love and talking about it.” Not only has life experience helped her to write about love in a whole new way, but her sense of place and identity has too. “I think a part of why I’m able to write love songs like this now is that I’m being more true to myself. It feels like I’ve become the person that I always wanted to be and not the person that other people want me to be, which was gratifying enough for a long time but not anymore.”

And with that greater confidence in her sense of identity, more honest lyrics have been pouring out. None more so than on ‘Best Guess’, on which features the first gendered pronouns in Lucy’s songwriting: “You may not be an angel, but you are my girl.”

With all three identifying as queer, their live sets proved heart-warming, community-building places. “What a unique perspective to look out into the crowd and see that happening,” Lucy says of the experience. “I’ll forever be holding the sight from the stage of watching people not just sing at us but to each other. Seeing friends connect over the themes and find words to express their care for each other. I have benefited from music my whole life in that way, and to make music other people benefit from in that way feels like a miracle.”

Both Julien and Phoebe feature on the record, providing backing vocals to multiple songs, including its title track and ‘Most Wanted Man’. But in terms of Lucy’s own sense of queerness, it took time to establish her sense of sexuality (“I started talking about it later than understanding it”), but more recently she’s been more than happy to talk about it, leading to some funny situations. “I’ve been offered interviews where it’s like ‘oh we’d like to interview you as a queer icon’. What the hell? I’m in my twenties, I’m a queer icon? What are you talking about?”

The term icon may have lost much of its literal meaning, but the point is that Lucy and her bandmates have consistently shown up for the LGBTQ+ community. When Nashville imposed anti-drag laws in 2023, the group promptly played their show in the city in full drag attire, and they’ve since taken further opportunities to speak out.

Admittedly, though, having gone from indie musician to the mainstream spotlight, Lucy has found that being exposed to a wider audience has had plenty of drawbacks.

With the ability to criticise every photo, social media post or action of those in the public eye - often especially those using their platform to speak out - now at everyone’s fingertips, Lucy’s rise from indie musician to mainstream name has brought with it increased scrutiny.. In January, she shared a casting call for her song ‘Best Guess’ looking for “hot mascs,” leading to the song achieving moderate viral success. In February, the resulting clip was shared, with its stars including MUNA’s Naomi McPherson, Towa Bird and model Cara Delevingne. The backlash was immediate, as viewers criticised the lack of both racial and body diversity among the cast. “People in the public eye talk about this to each other a lot because you’re still a person and the kid version of yourself is somewhere within you and getting bullied,” she notes. “Or [when you have] people telling you that you’re ugly or the art is bad, or [that] you actually have evil intentions. They don’t know you. It can be difficult.”

Even when intentions are good, it can become impossible to appease expectations you may not even realise exist. “I gave away $10K to trans people’s GoFundMes for surgeries and people were like ‘that’s not enough money’,” she says, nodding to a recent pledge to support a selection of trans people’s fundraisers for gender-affirming care. “They have no idea what my finances are like, but they’re right that it’s not enough. The point isn’t that you’re going to solve these things, it’s that I do regularly want to give away money and I feel good about that.”

Admittedly, though, it’s this part of being a musician she enjoys the least. With an increasingly public presence, she’s keen to point out during our conversation how she still makes music for the same reasons she did at the start of her career. Having now moved from indie label Matador to major label Universal, she has bigger budgets and space to be more imaginative, but still expects a certain sense of cynicism towards her decision. “I think that people have pessimism around popular things and I don’t know if I get to change that, but I trust my methods and my intentions, I very much feel like the same guy.”

Lucy has always been someone who advocates for what she believes in, but away from concerns about industry welfare and increased attention, she has been focusing on being more present for those she loves. “There is impermanence and I think remembering that can clarify your decisions and how you spend your time. I need to be hanging out with the people I love, I need to be prioritising interacting with the Earth, I need to tell people that I love them more.”

There’s an impermanence surrounding ‘Forever Is A Feeling’, the sense that relationships can be doomed to fail, that we can be scarred by our experiences of trying and willing to connect with each other. Everyone changes in spirit and mind over time, are we destined to drift apart? The truth is that you’ll never know until you try and what Lucy tells us is that taking a leap of faith can be worth it, even if it doesn’t end in everlasting romance, we gain so much from the people we encounter. “I think the point of this record is that your fantasies can come true if you’re willing to be brave enough to change your life.”

‘Forever Is A Feeling’ is out now via Interscope.

Tags: Features, Interviews, April 2025, From The Magazine, Lucy Dacus