Most visitors to The Huntington — one of the world’s most revered educational libraries and museums, and home to over 100 acres of botanical gardens — aren’t allowed to explore the landscape in the dead of night in a golf cart. Lucy Dacus and her band, however, were given a free pass to unwind and wander after being on stage.
The stillness almost worked against the effort to bring down her accumulated adrenaline. "It was so eerie," Dacus tells GRAMMY.com from her home in Los Angeles the following morning. "It was absolutely a place you’d see a ghost."
The sprawling San Marino, California estate was the final location of a quartet of secret shows that occurred in late February, each performed for a few hundred people in venues unaccustomed to performances of pop music. With just an acoustic guitar and two accompanying instrumentalists, Dacus previewed songs from her fourth full-length album, Forever Is A Feeling.
Though Dacus strives for all her shows to feel special, momentous or "this one-of-one unrepeatable aspect," the deliberate choice of these spaces (including Holy Trinity Church in Brooklyn, the Driehaus Museum in Chicago, and the Legion of Honor in San Francisco) drew some not-so-subtle inspiration from her new record. Forever Is A Feeling infuses classical influences — such as the baroque and romantic artistic movements, and stringed chamber music — with Dacus' own modern indie folk sensibility, ornamented vocals, and lyrical intimacy.
The small shows became a grounding experience for an artist whose life achieved a new kind of irreplicable scale recently. The singer and songwriter spent the better part of 2023 and early 2024 as part of boygenius, the indie rock supergroup that she and fellow songwritersJulien Baker and Phoebe Bridgers formed out of the bonds of their genuine friendship and complimentary musical strengths.
Already considered to be generational artists on their own, boygenius became a cultural force of nature. The supergroup were the subject of significant industry discourse, appeared on "SNL," and embarked on a sold-out arena tour that catered to thousands of concertgoers on a nightly basis. Their debut LP, the record, hit No. 4 on the Billboard 200 and netted three golden gramophones (Best Alternative Music Album, Best Rock Song and Best Rock Performance) at the 2024 GRAMMYs. The record was also nominated for Album Of The Year.
When boygenius’ name was announced for their first win of the night, Dacus was caught by the cameras literally running down the aisle to get to the stage as quickly as possible, with Baker and Bridgers in close pursuit. "I didn’t even realize I was the one that started running," recalls Dacus. "It was unbelievable in the moment. I think I might have blacked out. Phoebe and Julien often made me do the speeches because Phoebe hates doing speeches and Julien gets nervous. I think I said, ‘This doesn’t feel real,’ which is true."
By the time boygenius announced an indefinite hiatus to focus on solo endeavors, Dacus had already written half of what would become Forever Is A Feeling. "Having a couple of things going at once is what makes sense to me," explains Dacus. "Whenever I’ve put out a record I have at least half a record already written. It kind of helps me know that I’m not done. I think that if I put out a record and I had zero songs [for the next] I would have an absolute crisis."
Dacus’ last solo album, 2021’s Home Video, was an intimate, personal history, knitting together narratives from her own detailed accounts as a lifelong diarist and perspective as a young woman. Forever Is A Feeling reflects a far more present perspective, one that coincided with a greater internal honesty. "I have a reputation amongst my friends to be the person that starts the hard conversation," Daucus says. "Honesty is often painful, but I’ve never regretted being honest to other people. But I was realizing that I wasn’t being honest with myself."
Giving this newfound honesty shape and form, Dacus essentially presents Forever Is A Feeling as her own treatise on love: The anticipation of it; its physicality and comfort; the way it can ruin and hollow you out; the actions it convinces you to commit; the person you want to become to earn it; that there’s something to gain from all its facets. "I’m saying things super up-front," says Dacus. "They’re not super cloaked."
Perhaps the most acute demonstration of this forthrightness is "Best Guess." While Dacus is queer, she says she deliberately used ambiguous pronouns in her work to allow listeners to live in the songs in a way that is accurate to their own lives. "Best Guess" breaks this self-imposed rule for the first time with the lines such as "clasping your necklace / zipping your dress" and "you may not be an angel / but you are my girl."
"I have never wanted people to be interested in my love life. But I am interested in talking about love in general, so that includes my love life in a life of love," she says. Dacus confesses that she doesn’t rank the types of love that she feels, but their interconnectedness is part of why she now feels comfortable talking about such a personal topic.
To ensure that the instrumental arrangements matched her lyrical vulnerability, Dacus tapped producer/composer and previous collaborator Blake Mills. Forever Is A Feeling was recorded in great part at L.A.'s Sound City, where Mills works, and the space was large enough to record a full band live. "Me singing and everyone playing at the same time I think is why the songs feel as good as they do. I think you can react instinctually to each other a little more accurately," she says, noting that one of her goals was to try many different things during each recording session.
For every tried and true approach, Dacus implemented new musical languages. For every familiar inclusion of someone from her past — Bridgers and Baker provide back vocals ("Modigliani," "Forever Is A Feeling," "Most Wanted Man"), Jay Som’s Melina Duterte is on synths and bass ("Forever Is A Feeling," "Best Guess"), Collin Pastore and Jake Finch offered additional engineering and production work — there were new components. Among these novel additions were the elegant string and piano work of Phoenix Rousiamanis and a duet vocal with Hozier.
Much like her previous records, Dacus says the making of Forever Is A Feeling felt less like the building of a house and more like fishing. Rather than building brick by brick, she paid attention, waited, and moving subtly in the hope she'd have some luck. That creative outlook dovetails with Dacus' personal views on what it means to love and faith in other people — platonically, romantically, or even existentially. There is value in it, no matter how it presents itself to you.
Dacus reflects on a lyric from album closer "Lost Time": "Nothing last forever, but let’s see how far we get.’ That line, it feels like a very central theme to the record," she says. "We can’t promise forever, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not worth doing."