Lucy Dacus Invites Us into the Complicated Past on Home Video

“Christine” also finds a young Dacus in the church’s orbit: “We’re coming home from a sermon saying how bent on evil we are,” she sings, addressing a friend (or perhaps a would-be someone more?) who is about to retreat into a possibly doomed relationship. And as any devoted friend should, Dacus offers to “throw my shoe at the altar” if it means saving her mate from ending up with “somebody who won’t make you happy.” 

Mixed in with the religious retrospective are thoughtful snippets from past encounters with friends and partners. On “Cartwheel,” an intricate folk tune reminiscent of The Staves, Dacus watches future plans with a partner unfurl, closing the song with “The future isn’t worth its weight in gold / The future is a benevolent black hole.” “Thumbs,” meanwhile, is a revenge fantasy about killing off a friend’s dirtbag dad. That may sound grotesque, but the longtime live favorite among Dacus fans is actually more of a study in fierce friendship—the kind where holding hands is normal and protecting one another is second nature. “I would kill him if you let me,” Dacus offers. And on “Brando,” a delightful soft-rock jam, Dacus revisits a “dramatic friend” who “never knew me like you thought you did.”

“Going Going Gone,” which features Dacus’ boygenius bandmates Phoebe Bridgers and Julien Baker (who all have a steady habit of popping up on each other’s solo records) on backup vocals, recounts a high school fling complete with “locking lips and braces brackets.” But the song doesn’t stop at adolescent angst. Dacus indulges in a vivid environmental metaphor (“The sunset threw a tantrum / it wasn’t ready to go just yet / Mother Earth said, ‘time for bed’ / it resisted and the sky went red”), followed by a fit of laughter from Bridgers and Baker. The trio appears again on “Please Stay,” where Dacus pleads with a loved one who is sinking into a dark place.

Going home can get uncomfortable. The actual acts of exiting onto the interstate or hopping on a plane to see family may not be unpleasant—in fact, they are quite the opposite in the best cases—but the spiritual act of retracing one’s steps? Walking the halls of your high school, your childhood church, the streets of your small town, thinking deeply about your upbringing all the while? Those acts could elicit some discomfort. But rather than flee the unease, Dacus sits in it on Home Video. She writes every awkward rendezvous and heart-wrenching conversation alike using the sharpest of pens. She melds the nostalgia of a Springsteen track (see: “Hot & Heavy”) with her own knack for detail to forge an album that gracefully and truthfully faces the past. 

Following a showstopper like Historian is never an easy task, even for a titan like Dacus, but she nevertheless answered the call—from both herself and her devoted listeners. You can hear in these songs that Dacus wrote them not just as inscriptions in a scrapbook spanning her whole life, but also for us. As on Historian, her history becomes ours on Home Video.

Ellen Johnson is a former Paste music editor and forever pop culture enthusiast. Presently, she’s a copy editor, freelance writer and aspiring marathoner. You can find her tweeting about all the things on Twitter @ellen_a_johnson and re-watching Little Women on Letterboxd.