Lucy Dacus does not rock.
Last night, at her second of two shows at St. Paul's Palace Theatre, the music swelled and ebbed and swayed and even occasionally raced a bit. But, in the immortal words of Local H’s Scott Lucas, "rockin' was nowhere in sight."
I’m not complaining, and last night’s audience—mostly young women, many of them likely in couples but that’s none of my business—did not find Dacus lacking either. We who were not there to rock saluted her.
But the lack of sweat and grit in Dacus’s music can exude a whiff of the genteel to the unmoved. At Pitchfork, for instance, Laura Snapes found Dacus’s latest album, Forever Is a Feeling, “hamstrung by caution and daintiness, protecting infatuation in its gilded cage.” Similarly, Jon Bream noted yesterday in a largely positive Star Tribune review that Dacus’s Monday night performance “suffered from a sameness of tempo,” and he hoped that her music would expand beyond the “modest chamber pop sound of restrained guitars, dampened violins, and mild synth soundscapes.”
But the cautious crush out too. Some of us swoon within, and Dacus sings for us. You could spot that breed of yearner in the Palace crowd, mouthing lyrics almost inaudibly. There were singalongs last night, but there were also murmur-alongs. Where Snapes hears Dacus muting the passions expressed in her lyrics, I find the precision of her arrangements of a piece with the exacting way she writes about the enormity of her feelings. Both lyrics and music seek to contain the uncontainable. You could call that neurotic, I suppose, or repressed, but you could also call it art.
Dacus’s last headlining gig hereabouts was at First Ave in 2022, after the release of her third album, Home Video, and her life has changed plenty since. There’s the phenomenon of boygenius, her trio with Phoebe Bridgers and Julien Baker; their 2023 tour served as a formative experience for so many young queer women, though it never made it up to Minnesota. And Dacus revealed her newish relationship with Baker when the latest album dropped in March, though it had been rumored online before that and addressed none-too-subtly in her new lyrics. She also signed to Matador and just turned 30.
Mostly, her perspective has changed. Dacus now sings about the present, with an eye toward the future. Touring behind Home Video, she was still processing her adolescence; her show was preceded with video clips from her youth, and the songs, as I wrote in my review, hummed “with the ecstatic awkwardness of physical proximity, the inability to tell whether you’re exercising superhuman restraint to keep from making a fool of yourself or frozen with fear in ways you’ll regret forever.”
On Forever Is a Feeling, Dacus takes the long view from the vantage of adulthood. And so older songs like “Triple Dog Dare,” about young love nipped in the bud by a nosey mom, felt like scrapbooks, a sharp contrast to new songs like “Big Deal,” where Dacus confesses romantic feelings but then imagines attending her crush’s wedding.
And a real oldie like “I Don't Wanna Be Funny Anymore,” from way back in 2016, felt like an endearingly awkward yearbook photo; Dacus, in black jeans, black blazer, and baggy white blouse, looked like a person who’d clearly arrived at a certain version of herself, showing little in common with the song’s worried, half-formed narrator.
Dacus got the sex out of the way early last night. She opened with “Hot and Heavy,” about a formerly tame friend turned makeout partner (and then turned distant memory). This led into “Ankles,” the horniest song on the new album, which imagines a night of pulling hair in the bedroom at night and sipping tea in the kitchen the next morning. “How lucky are we to have so much to lose?” Dacus sang—if before she was haunted by the finality of the past, now it’s the uncertainty of tomorrow.
An image of the Fates materialized behind Dacus during “Ankles,” which mentions those ancient Greek weavers of destiny. The set was a museum wall (not beating the accusations of gentility that way, Luce) patterned on the Barnes in Philly. (Absolutely worth visiting, incidentally, despite its controversial origins.) But where that museum concentrates on modern art (lotta great Cezannes), the images behind Dacus ranged from modernist to romantic and classical, providing for a simple but effective backdrop.
The setting was most effective later in the set, during “Lost Time,” where the frames became windows and gray skies first gave way to storms, then yielded to lovely pink clouds. It’s as direct a love song as Dacus has written, though the sweet sentiment of the chorus—”But I love you, and every day/That I knew and didn't say/Is lost time”—is less remarkable than the details that come flooding in a later verse: “I put your clothes on the dresser with your 60-day chip/And your broken gold chain, your unpaid parking ticket/I notice everything about you, I can't help it.”
Of course she can’t—she’s a writer, and writers notice for a living. Compare the opening stanza of “Limerance,” which sketches a party through the actions of three people: one gets stoned and discusses the title concept (a fancy word for yearning), another is kicking ass at GTA (“why is he is so good at this game/It should be cause for concern”). Meanwhile, Dacus is gobbling popcorn as she frets about a relationship she’s planning to end.
But another reason Dacus can’t overlook detail is because description is her love language. Noticing is her form of caring. There are love songs that capture how it would feel to sing them to someone, and love songs that capture how we wished someone else would sing to us. For me, maybe because I’m a careless person, Dacus’s are often the latter.
“Best Guess” (“you are my best guess at the future”) should be a first dance song at queer weddings. If she loses her love, she sang “I will be fine/But I don't wanna be fine/I want you, you, you.” And on “Come Out,” she sang “There is no distance that wouldn’t be too far/Even on opposite sides of the room, I am orbiting you” without seeming clingy.
The show was hardly barrelling along when it came time for the acoustic portion of the evening. Dacus settled into a plush blue couch with imitation gold trim—you know, like the kind you sit on in a museum to get a better perspective on a work, or when it’s time to check your phone—and her five-piece band, which included two synth players who doubled on strings when necessary, gathered around her.
“Flinty” neo-local singer-songwriter Samia joined Dacus on the loveseat to sing a verse on “Bullseye.” “She’s going to be Hozier tonight,” Dacus told us (that soulful foghorn sings on the recording) and by my lights that was trading up. Dacus also promised “something which has never been done before,” which turned out to be a nuanced full band arrangement of “Trust,” from 2016, a song she usually performs solo.
For her encore, Dacus was essentially enveloped by her boygenius song, “True Blue,” which crested in that way Coldplay used to when they still got good reviews. Then of course came “Night Shift.” There’s something satisfying about an artist who’s arrived upon an inevitable closing number, especially so early in her career, and “Night Shift” is just that, a “Rosalita” for drama-craving lesbians born after 9/11 who dance by gently twisting their hips back and forth while keeping their feet firmly planted.
It was toward the end of the evening, when she praised the crowd’s “uniquely good vibes,” that it occurred to me, unfortunately, that Dacus is extremely likable. I say “unfortunately” because I realize that’s a loaded compliment for a woman, especially coming from a man nearly twice her age. At its worst “likability” is a male supremacist cudgel for whacking at women who are “unlikable”—who refuse to tamp down their personalities to make men feel better. At its best it comes off as patronizing as fuck.
But let me try and wriggle out of the sexism charges here. In a positive sense, likability is a more modest but no less compelling form of charisma, a quality that draws you to a performer, and that certainly can coexist with brilliance. Kim Deal is likeable. So is Q-Tip. John Prine is likable. No one would call any of those folks pushovers; and none of them would be so appealing if they expressed a desperate need to be liked. There’s just a warmth in their voice we respond to.
That’s true of Dacus as well, and her writing amplifies that likability. While I’d never call her merely nice (she’s too honest for that), she is kind, considerate of others’ feelings without stifling her own, with the foresight to realize that to avoid hurting others now can just hurt them more later. And this takes us back to her inherent thoughtfulness, her avoidance of the offhand, the spontaneous, the reckless. There’s a tradeoff here, of course. But moderate tempos are a small price to pay for such a wise sensibility.
Setlist
Calliope Prelude
Hot & Heavy
Ankles
Modigliani
Limerence
Big Deal
First Time
Triple Dog Dare
Talk
Come Out
Best Guess
For Keeps
Trust
I Don't Wanna Be Funny Anymore
Bullseye
Most Wanted Man
Lost Time
Forever Is a Feeling
Encore
True Blue
Night Shift
