Some moments on Lucy Dacus’ debut record No Burden buzz with the same mischievous tingle you feel while sneakily reading pages of a diary mistakenly left out in the open. You shouldn’t be privy to these private thoughts, but you can’t turn away.
“Map on a Wall” begins as a ballad, building over the course of seven minutes into a stunning anthem about self-discovery and acceptance, but not before Dacus begs for mercy, crooning, “Oh please, don’t make fun of me,” before she lists her perceived flaws: crooked teeth, a pigeon-toed stance, knobby knees and emotional baggage. On “I Don’t Wanna Be Funny Anymore,” a glistening pop gem riding on a rolling, fuzzy bass riff that’ll sit in your head for days, Dacus daydreams about being someone else. She looks at a crumbling relationship in “Dream State…,” and revisits it again in the album’s sparse, lingering closer, “...Familiar Place.” On “Direct Address” she seems to be lusting after someone she can’t or shouldn’t have.
Song after song, No Burden is full of the kind of deeply personal thoughts we’ve all had but would only be willing to share with our truest, closest friends — if even then. It makes sense that Dacus initially penned these tracks with the security of thinking they’d go unheard.
“I wrote them just because I had to,” she tells the Scene by phone from a tour stop in Portland, Ore. “I didn’t think about, ‘Oh, I’m going to get a band one day. I’m going to show people these.’ There wasn’t that much forethought. I didn’t realize I’d play them for people.”
But when friend and guitarist Jacob Blizard asked to produce her songs for course credit at Oberlin College and Conservatory, she agreed. The two Richmond, Va., musicians teamed up with Nashville producer Collin Pastore and recorded an album’s worth of material at Nashville’s Starstruck Studio. Dacus admits that the same factors that emboldened her lyrics also made her studio time a little bumpy.
“I’m really happy with how everything turned out,” Dacus says, “but in the moment it was extremely difficult, just logistically, because I had never taken any music classes. I [didn’t] know the vocabulary. I [didn’t] know how to communicate with the band. I’ve definitely learned how to communicate better since then, but there was a lot of tension that was probably my fault, just trying to hold on to total control of all my own content.”
Despite the steep learning curve, the results were impressive. Well before the initial release of No Burden on Richmond’s EggHunt Records in February 2016, she’d been fielding offers from labels. Barely 15 months after her first tour, she signed with Matador Records, becoming labelmates with the likes of Belle and Sebastian, Car Seat Headrest, Cat Power and Julien Baker. Now, for better or worse, everyone knows her secrets. Or, at least, they think they do.
“It felt like a relief that I could [open up] in a massive way and feel like people understood on a grand scale,” she says. “It’s also super unfair because I wish I knew an equivalent about the people I meet. I still don’t really know how to navigate that part of this, interacting with people who do know so much about me. People make assumptions about who I am based off of the songs, and that can be accurate, and very much not accurate.”
Dacus will have a chance to clear the air with record No. 2. Earlier this year, she and her band returned to Nashville, this time setting up in Paul Moak’s Smoakstack studio, to make No Burden’s follow-up. But Dacus’ newfound success isn’t keeping her from baring her soul. If anything, she’s getting louder.
“I really knew what my resources were going to be,” she says about the new material, which should begin to appear later this year ahead of an early-2018 release. “There’s horns on the record, there’s strings. It’s not all over the whole thing — we didn’t become an orchestra — but it feels like the songs are way more realized.”
