Forever Is A Feeling

About

The thing about desire is it relies on the not-having of the thing you want; then sometimes you get it, and the whole game change. In the case of Lucy Dacus—the dreamy singer-songwriter and guitarist, best known these days as one-third of indie-rock supergroup boygenius—the conundrum could apply to any number of current-life situation, among them her unexpected success as a Grammy-winning rock god. “I think that through boygeniu, it felt like, ‘Well, what else? I don’t want more than thi,’” Dacus tells Apple Music. “I feel like I’ve been very career-oriented because I’ve just wanted to play music, satisfy my own drive, and make things that I can be proud of. Getting Grammys and stuff, I’m like, ‘Well, I guess that’s the end of the line. What is my life about?’” On her fourth solo album, <i>Forever Is a Feeling</i>, Dacus takes a heartfelt stab at answering that question, and in doing so, opens another desire-related can of worm. While the record explores the intoxicating, confusing, fleeting qualities of romance, it simultaneously functions as a fan-fic-worthy relationship reveal. (She went public with her relationship with boygenius bandmate Julien Baker weeks before the album’s release.) On <i>Forever</i>, Dacus dives headfirst into the implied complication, recruiting co-producer Blake Mills for subversive, swooning folk-pop numbers that revel in the mysteries of love, and what precedes it. Dacus’ songwriting has always been vulnerable, though perhaps never this much, nor in this way. “What if we don’t touch?” she begins the super-sexy “Ankles” by proposing—instead, she imagines hypothetical bitten shoulder, pulled hair, crossword puzzles finished together the morning after. (“It’s about not being able to get what you want,” Dacus says of the song. “You want to get them in bed, but you also want to wake up with them in the morning and have sweet, intimate moment, and you can’t. So, you just have to use your imagination about what that might be like.”) She explores the in-between stages of a relationship on the wispy “For Keep,” takes a quiet road trip through the mountains with her partner on “Talk,” and on “Big Deal,” she wonders to a star-crossed lover if things could ever go back to how it was before, though the climactic final chorus suggests otherwise. .

via Apple Music

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