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For Lucy Dacus, the guitar is a tool that connects her to other people. That idea has been central to her identity as a singer-songwriter since her 2016 debut, No Burden. Since then, she’s released a string of acclaimed solo albums and, in 2018, joined forces with Phoebe Bridgers and Julien Baker to form Boygenius, the supergroup known for its candid songwriting, close harmonies, and egalitarian, uninhibited spirit. Together and separately, they’ve helped define a new wave of emotionally honest indie rock.
On Dacus’ most recent solo album, Forever Is a Feeling, the acoustic guitar takes a more central role than in her previous work. That’s partly due to a self-imposed rule at the outset of the recording process: no electric guitars. “I always like to start records with arbitrary rules,” she says, “because it forces intentionality and creativity into the process.” The more acoustic-driven sound also suits the material, which is introspective and tender—the album is, at heart, a chronicle of Dacus’s experience of falling in love with her bandmate Julien Baker.
When I spoke with Dacus, 30, over Zoom recently, she was at home in Los Angeles, taking a break between tour legs and puzzling over what to pack. From there, the conversation opened into a wider reflection on her musical life: touring habits, writing rituals, and the role the acoustic guitar has played in shaping her voice and songs.
Traveling Light, Writing Freely
At the start of our conversation, Dacus was tangling with a familiar touring dilemma: which books to pack. We agreed that you want options, but not so many that you’re dragging around a small library. If a book’s too short, you’ll finish it too quickly; too long, and you’ve committed precious suitcase space to a heavy tome. You don’t want to feel weighed down.
Dacus prizes a similar lightness in her choice of guitars. “I have a lot of small parlor guitars, and when I’m writing, I want to kind of not notice that I’m holding a guitar,” she says. On tour these days, she adds, “I’ll go to guitar shops with my band, and they’re always trying to find cool gear, and I’ll go look at the tiny unmarked kids’ guitar.”
When I ask about what she plays, she mentions the rich, buttery tone of Collings guitars and the reliability of Martins on tour—but her favorite is a half-sized nylon-string with no markings at all, on which she writes most of her songs. She picked up that guitar somewhere in the Northeast during a tour—she can’t recall where. “I thought we needed a little buddy that could be up in the benches of the van, not tucked away in a case, so that I could write in the van.”
Does she write a lot on the road? “I think I write whenever I’m not supposed to,” she says. “I write on tour, or I’ll be at someone else’s show and mishear a lyric and write it down. I recently got a lyric idea while playing a show! I was like, I need to focus on what I’m doing, but I don’t want to forget this.”
Dacus tends to write while walking—lyrics and melodies forming in her mind—then returns home to figure out the chords. “I think that’s why a lot of my songs don’t have repeated parts, because I write them while walking around,” she says. “My band sometimes gets annoyed with me because the songs are pretty through-written.”
I mention she still writes a good chorus now and then—like “Best Guess” from the new record—and she smiles, accepting the compliment.
Early Lessons
An exploratory, intuitive quality has been with Dacus from the start. She grew up in Mechanicsville, Virginia, a suburb of Richmond, the daughter of two musicians who played in their church band. As a young child, she was drawn to her father’s dreadnought. “It was a really big-bodied guitar, so as a kid I really couldn’t even get my arms around it,” she recalls. “But I would play with it and pretend that I knew what I was doing.”
She would “write songs”—she makes air quotes as she says it—by plucking the open strings in different sequences and rhythms. She didn’t yet know how to fret with her left hand. “When my grandpa died,” she says, “I wrote a song in his honor, but it was just me playing the bottom three strings, and then the top three strings, and then the bottom three strings, and then the top three strings.” Her parents were encouraging. “They’d be like, ‘Good job!’” she recalls, laughing.
Inspiration came from other places, too. At church camp, Dacus noticed how the guys with guitars could really gather people. “You know the ones I’m talking about,” she says. The overeager youth pastor with an acoustic guitar has become an easy punchline, but to Dacus, it was an early lesson in the guitar’s connective power. That portability was a big part of its appeal. “My mom tried to teach me piano, but I was so ornery about it,” she says. She liked that the guitar didn’t require her to be stationary—that she could take it anywhere.
On a recent trip to her hometown, Dacus retrieved the three-quarter-size Ibanez she first learned on and brought it back to L.A. “Your first guitar has so much sentimental value,” she says. She and her father had found the instrument on Craigslist and bought it for $100 “from some guy in some parking lot.” She named it Todd, after her middle school boyfriend’s middle name. “The first song I learned was ‘Just Like Heaven’ by the Cure, which kind of remains a flex. That’s still a great song.” From there, she started learning pop hits of the day.
Once she could drive, Dacus and her best friend would head southeast to Virginia Beach, busking until they earned enough money for a meal, then heading home. One day, a rogue wave came out of nowhere, drenching them and their things—including the guitar. “The water went into my guitar, and I was like, ‘My life is ruined, this is my most precious thing.’” The guitar survived—“for the most part,” she adds.
Back at school, a history teacher encouraged her to bring in the guitar and share her songs. Soon, she and her friends were spending lunch in the school’s three-story stairwell, passing around Todd the Ibanez and singing. Around this time, Dacus began playing open mics in Richmond—not because she was chasing a career, but because she wanted to be part of what her creative friends were doing. But it clearly stuck.
A Supergroup with Shared Strings
Around 2018, Dacus and her friends Phoebe Bridgers and Julien Baker (Dacus’ now-partner) formed Boygenius, a supergroup that foregrounds the trio’s friendship as much as the songs themselves. I ask what it’s like writing in a band made up of three singer-songwriter guitarists.
“Well, we all definitely have our styles,” she says. “Julien’s just a ripper. She’s kinda known for reverb-y, arpeggiated, tastefully overdriven stuff. Just really beautiful, clean, high-end sounds. And then Phoebe is big on the rubber bridge, and baritone guitars, and open C or other really low tunings, and she plays really delicately and quietly. And I feel like I’m just kinda clanging along, Ramones-style. I do a lot of eighth-note downstrokes. So we all have a really different approach.”
After a few years of working together, they got to know each other’s styles well enough to recognize when the person who wrote a song might not be the right one to play guitar on it. “I’ll be like, Phoebe, you should play the guitar on this, or Julien should,” Dacus says. “Or one of them will write something and they’ll want a kind of looser quality, so they’ll ask me to play.”
Tuned to Her Own Style
On Forever Is a Feeling, that indie-rock eighth-note chug that might previously have been played on an electric guitar is instead carried by strings on “Ankles,” or by piano and synths on the title track—an effect of Dacus’ rule to avoid electric guitars. “There’s actually not as many electric guitars on the record as you might expect,” she says, “and they’re used in ways that are not always very typical.” When the electric guitar does appear—on the grungy “Talk” or the cruising, twangy “Most Wanted Man”—it feels earned. A special guest, not a main character.
Much of that electric work is by Madison Cunningham, who was initially hesitant when Dacus asked her to play a solo on “Best Guess.” “I think it must be hard to be a guitar god, because a bunch of people fancy themselves guitar gods and are annoying about it, but she actually is,” Dacus says. “It’s hard to say, like, ‘No, I’m different than those guys at Guitar Center.’”
Dacus is more humble about her own skills. When I ask if she played the acoustic guitar parts, she first shouts out her co-producers Collin Pastore, Jake Finch, and Blake Mills, as well as her live guitarist Alan Good Parker. She then describes recording sessions with Mills, where they sat on either side of an omnidirectional microphone—Dacus playing the song as she wrote it, and Mills responding in a way that blurred the line between doubling and counterpoint. You can hear the resulting interplay and inventive chord voicings, often in open tunings, on tracks like “Talk,” “For Keeps,” and “Come Out.”
“I’m not the most skilled player, although I think I maybe have a style,” she says. “I’m usually figuring out parts by ear. I don’t always even know what chords I’m playing, especially in an open tuning. I’m just twisting the knobs. I don’t want to compare myself to Joni Mitchell, but…”
She trails off, but the comparison lands: Mitchell famously created her own tuning system, using shapes and sounds rather than theory to develop her harmonically adventurous songs.
“I’ll say this in service to whoever’s reading this,” Dacus adds. “One way to start playing guitar is to find an open tuning. I write a ton in open D, but also in weird tunings that don’t really have a name. Just find something that sounds cool to you. In an open tuning, you can bar it at any fret and that’s a chord. So if you really just want to write songs, and your goal isn’t to become a guitar master—you just want an accompaniment to your thoughts—that’s a very easy way to start.”
Dacus’ music is strong evidence that you don’t need to analyze every chord to make them resonate. “It is interesting, having never had formal lessons,” she says. “Sometimes I hear from guitar people something like ‘That’s really weird,’ or ‘I never would have thought of that,’ and I feel really good when that happens. When I show a song to somebody who’s like, ‘How did you come up with this?’ I’m just like, ‘That’s just how the song is.’”
Bringing People Together
Dacus mentioned early in the interview that she has some chronic pain issues that can make playing guitar difficult, so her relationship with the instrument is complicated. When I ask when she enjoys it most, she answers simply: “I like playing with people.”
She describes a recent day in the studio when she played a new song alone on guitar and wasn’t sure if it was any good. But once other musicians joined in, filling out the sound, the song came to life. “Being the core, being the origin, and having everything else come in to clothe it—that makes me feel very centered,” she says. “Some people get into guitar because they want an impressive skill, but I got into it because I thought, this will allow me to be with people in a new way. And that has remained true. I had all these ideas I could hum to myself, but grounding them in an instrument made it possible to share them.”
Several weeks after our conversation, I catch part of her live set at the Back Cove Festival in Portland, Maine. Onstage, she’s relaxed and confident, joking with her bandmates and kneeling down to hail her bassist’s shredding on her 2017 hit “Night Shift.” She strums nonchalantly, often in open D, delivering songs from Forever Is a Feeling alongside older favorites.
The emotional peak of the set arrives unannounced—unless you’d read recent coverage of Dacus’ tour. During “Best Guess,” one of her most unabashedly romantic songs and one she’s called a wedding song, Dacus invites three queer couples onstage. As the band vamps on the tune’s chords, she reads vows off a piece of paper, bouquet of red roses in hand, and pronounces the couples married. The audience cheers. People cry.
Yes, these were real weddings. Dacus announced on social media earlier this year that she’d gotten ordained and would be marrying couples at select shows. “I can think of all sorts of reasons people may be interested in securing the rights granted through marriage (you know what I mean?),” she wrote, “so if you’ve had it in mind forever or are just recently making the decision, I will be honored to do the honors!”
It may sound gimmicky on paper, but in the moment, it wasn’t. It felt like a direct expression of Dacus’ belief that songs—and guitars—can bring people together.
What She Plays
In addition to her Collings D2H; Todd, the $100 Ibanez; and a handful of vintage instruments of unknown origin, Dacus brings four Martin 000-15E acoustics on tour. (The multiples allow for different tunings and serve as backups.) Three of the Martins run through a Red-Eye preamp, while the fourth is routed through her electric guitar pedalboard and into a Fender Princeton Reverb amp.
Dacus uses Thomastik-Infeld Spectrum Bronze Medium Light (.012–.053) strings on all of the Martins, except for one that’s set up in Nashville tuning (a configuration where the lowest four strings are replaced with higher octave versions, typically from a 12-string set). That high-strung instrument is fitted with a D’Addario EJ38H (.010–.027) set.
For tunings on songs from Forever Is a Feeling, Dacus uses open D on “Big Deal,” “Lost Time,” and “Talk” (capo I); dropped D on “Come Out” (capo III); standard on “Best Guess”; and high strung standard on “Bullseye” (capo I).—IB
