The Subversive Love Songs of Lucy Dacus

One morning in January, I met the musician Lucy Dacus at the Cloisters, the medieval-art museum at the northwestern tip of Manhattan, overlooking the Hudson River. Dacus is a formidable solo artist—since 2016, she has released three albums of searching, intimate folk rock—but she’s perhaps best known as one-third of the indie supergroup boygenius, alongside Phoebe Bridgers and Julien Baker. Although boygenius formed in 2018, and put out an eponymous EP that year, the release of its début full-length, “The Record,” in 2023, was a seismic event: it garnered seven Grammy nominations and three wins, and earned the band a slot on a Timothée Chalamet-hosted episode of “Saturday Night Live,” a sold-out show at Madison Square Garden, and a Rolling Stone cover mimicking a portrait of Nirvana, in which the boys, as they are known, appear wearing Gucci power suits and wide ties, arms defensively crossed. For Americans exhausted by the long tail of the first Trump Presidency, with its suffocating ideas about identity (all three members of boygenius are queer), the band became a kind of generational loadstone, a flash of hope in an era defined by catastrophic backsliding. The boys made out onstage, ripped their shirts open, covered Shania Twain, soloed, dressed as the Holy Trinity, free-bled, and leaped into one another’s arms. The band offered a new and liberating portrayal of female friendship, along with a lesson in liberation more generally.

This spring, Dacus, who is twenty-nine, will release “Forever Is a Feeling,” her fourth solo record. It’s a gorgeous and tender album about falling in love—Dacus is now in a committed relationship with Baker—and how the tumult of that experience has forced her to reckon with the unknown. “This is bliss / This is Hell / Forever is a feeling / and I know it well,” Dacus sings on the title track. Her voice sounds pure and soft over a tangle of synthesizers, gamelan, harp, and drum machine. Dacus described the album as being partly about the idea of “coming to terms with change—of knowing that things aren’t forever,” and of finding freedom in the various ways we are asked, relentlessly and repeatedly, to reimagine ourselves and our lives.

Dacus and I met near the museum’s front entrance. The sky was gray and sagging; the Hudson was chunky with ice. When I arrived, Dacus was reading a copy of Vladimir Nabokov’s “Pale Fire,” from 1962, a novel that takes the form of a nine-hundred-and-ninety-nine-line poem, written by a fictional author named John Shade, with commentary by Charles Kinbote, a deranged and largely unbearable academic. (Kinbote could probably be thought of as a punisher, to borrow the title of Bridgers’s second record—a person who simply does not know when to zip it.) Dacus was into it. “He knows how to write insufferable people,” she said. Dacus is frequently described as statuesque—she is five feet ten inches, with icy blue-green eyes, and she exudes a kind of quiet, serene elegance that feels of another century. The cover of “Forever Is a Feeling” features an oil painting of her, done by the artist Will St. John, who is known for his portraits of drag queens and antique porcelain dolls. Dacus is pictured mostly nude, draped in gold cloth and glowing. Toward the bottom, there’s a strange and tiny figure in a dark cloak, walking. “That was left over from some other painting,” Dacus said. “I think he was planning to get rid of it. But I like him. He reminds me of the Fool in the tarot deck. He’s just starting out on a journey.”

The museum is made up of four cloisters—covered walkways flanked on one side by a colonnade—which were acquired in the early nineteen-hundreds by the sculptor George Grey Barnard, who collected architectural fragments from abbeys and churches built by monastic orders in the twelfth century. Barnard was famously unskilled when it came to managing his money, and, in 1925, he had to sell the cloisters to John D. Rockefeller, Jr. They were eventually donated, along with a large collection of medieval art works, to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The buildings are beautiful and tranquil but fundamentally incongruous (modern architecture mixed with bits of decaying monasteries, gathered from meadows in Catalonia and France). This makes the Cloisters feel both unmoored from and tethered to time.

Dacus had suggested the spot; it was her second visit in less than a year. “I came here this summer with Phoebe, for the first time, and we took a tour,” she said. “As you go through different eras, you notice so many of the same themes.” That idea—of a grand continuum, in which the circumstances change but all of our big human feelings (heartache, joy, unease, panic, contentment) remain the same, across time and vast distances—felt germane to her new songs. “All love feels new and one of a kind, and it is,” she said. “But also it’s the most ancient feeling.” When I pointed out to Dacus that “Forever Is a Feeling” is essentially a concept record about the agony and ecstasy of romance, she let out a groan. “It makes my stomach hurt,” she said. “It felt amazing to write. But now, on the brink of sharing it—I could throw up. Every single day, I’m just, like, ‘I can’t believe this is the job. Just plumb the depths and give it away!’ ”

We wandered along one cloister, stopping to admire a potted oleander with a sign that read “POISON.” “That was my great-uncle’s last name,” Dacus said, briefly assuming a thick Southern accent. “Ohhhh-lander,” she drawled. (Her father’s family is from Mississippi.) We settled on a stone bench in the chapter house, once a central part of Notre-Dame-de-Pontaut, a Benedictine monastery established in 1115, in Aquitaine. Every morning, the monks gathered there, arranging themselves on the long stone benches, to discuss the matters of the day. Now tourists and school groups inched past, whispering. Though no one approached Dacus directly, I couldn’t help but notice how often passersby—especially twentysomethings with cool haircuts and hand tattoos—silently angled their phones toward her.

Dacus and Baker have mostly kept their relationship private. Dacus didn’t want to hide it, exactly, and anyone who pays attention to her new lyrics could probably piece it together, but she was still working out just how much she wanted to disclose into my little recording machine. Boygenius has an unusually fervent and engaged fan base—perhaps because the band became very popular during the pandemic, when parasocial relationships were all we had, or perhaps because they make confessional music about intimate entanglements among various genders, which can be rare to find in popular music. In recent years, the scrutiny has become intense. There are long and detailed discussion threads online, speculating about the romance between Dacus and Baker. Dacus said that her followers have been respectful of her boundaries, but “it only takes a handful to make your life feel like a really easily threatened thing.” Then she added, “I’ve been practicing not reinforcing that narrative to myself.”

I told Dacus that I might not have asked about her love life if it weren’t so plainly central to the songs. “It’s been interesting, because I want to protect what is precious in my life, but also to be honest, and make art that’s true,” she said. “I think maybe a part of it is just trusting that it’s not at risk.” She paused. “Maybe a healthier way to think about it is that it’s not actually fragile. These songs are about different people. But, you know, ‘Most Wanted Man in West Tennessee’—what are you gonna do?” (Baker was born and brought up outside Memphis.)

That song is jangly and rich, featuring electric guitar, pump organ, and synthesizers. Tonally, it reminds me a little of Big Star’s “Thirteen,” in part because it captures something about the tenuousness of new love:

Now I feel your hand under the table, at the fancy restaurant
Gripping on my inner thigh, like if you don’t I’m gonna run
But I’m not going anywhere, least not anywhere you’re not

Dacus said that she has only ever found romantic love with friends or collaborators. “How are you doing romance without friendship?” she said, laughing. “I can’t imagine. That feels so hollow. It makes me feel ill! Someone that’s not my friend? Are you serious? Almost every relationship I have been in, we’ve had some business or creative dealings. I don’t mean this just sexually, but it turns me on.” She went on, “To have your minds meet on something, and be, like, ‘Oh, my gosh, you said what I couldn’t say. I love your mind.’ ”

One of my favorite tracks on the new record is “For Keeps,” a gentle, cottony wisp of a song, barely more than two minutes long, just Dacus and an acoustic guitar. “For Keeps” is about falling in love with someone who is fundamentally unavailable to you, or maybe you’re unavailable to each other, who knows—something doesn’t align.

The song begins with a sharp intake of breath. Dacus’s vocals are close and unhurried. There’s a hint of a tremble in her tone. I explained to her that I’d been listening to the song in my car earlier that morning, when a flock of Canada geese flew low and heavy over the highway, and I found myself weeping, suddenly, inelegantly, because the whole thing just felt so unlikely—the meaty old Canada goose is not the most probable flier, and we don’t know how migratory birds find their way south, instinctively navigating between two poles. Yet there they went, perfectly aligned, hungry for warmth. The song ends with a sigh of resignation: