One morning in January, I met the musician Lucy Dacus at the Cloisters, the medieval-art museum at the northwestern tip of Manhattan, overlooking the Hudson River. Dacus is a formidable solo artist—since 2016, she has released three albums of searching, intimate folk rock—but she’s perhaps best known as one-third of the indie supergroup boygenius, alongside Phoebe Bridgers and Julien Baker. Although boygenius formed in 2018, and put out an eponymous EP that year, the release of its début full-length, “The Record,” in 2023, was a seismic event: it garnered seven Grammy nominations and three wins, and earned the band a slot on a Timothée Chalamet-hosted episode of “Saturday Night Live,” a sold-out show at Madison Square Garden, and a Rolling Stone cover mimicking a portrait of Nirvana, in which the boys, as they are known, appear wearing Gucci power suits and wide ties, arms defensively crossed. For Americans exhausted by the long tail of the first Trump Presidency, with its suffocating ideas about identity (all three members of boygenius are queer), the band became a kind of generational loadstone, a flash of hope in an era defined by catastrophic backsliding. The boys made out onstage, ripped their shirts open, covered Shania Twain, soloed, dressed as the Holy Trinity, free-bled, and leaped into one another’s arms. The band offered a new and liberating portrayal of female friendship, along with a lesson in liberation more generally.
This spring, Dacus, who is twenty-nine, will release “Forever Is a Feeling,” her fourth solo record. It’s a gorgeous and tender album about falling in love—Dacus is now in a committed relationship with Baker—and how the tumult of that experience has forced her to reckon with the unknown. “This is bliss / This is Hell / Forever is a feeling / and I know it well,” Dacus sings on the title track. Her voice sounds pure and soft over a tangle of synthesizers, gamelan, harp, and drum machine. Dacus described the album as being partly about the idea of “coming to terms with change—of knowing that things aren’t forever,” and of finding freedom in the various ways we are asked, relentlessly and repeatedly, to reimagine ourselves and our lives.
Dacus and I met near the museum’s front entrance. The sky was gray and sagging; the Hudson was chunky with ice. When I arrived, Dacus was reading a copy of Vladimir Nabokov’s “Pale Fire,” from 1962, a novel that takes the form of a nine-hundred-and-ninety-nine-line poem, written by a fictional author named John Shade, with commentary by Charles Kinbote, a deranged and largely unbearable academic. (Kinbote could probably be thought of as a punisher, to borrow the title of Bridgers’s second record—a person who simply does not know when to zip it.) Dacus was into it. “He knows how to write insufferable people,” she said. Dacus is frequently described as statuesque—she is five feet ten inches, with icy blue-green eyes, and she exudes a kind of quiet, serene elegance that feels of another century. The cover of “Forever Is a Feeling” features an oil painting of her, done by the artist Will St. John, who is known for his portraits of drag queens and antique porcelain dolls. Dacus is pictured mostly nude, draped in gold cloth and glowing. Toward the bottom, there’s a strange and tiny figure in a dark cloak, walking. “That was left over from some other painting,” Dacus said. “I think he was planning to get rid of it. But I like him. He reminds me of the Fool in the tarot deck. He’s just starting out on a journey.”
The museum is made up of four cloisters—covered walkways flanked on one side by a colonnade—which were acquired in the early nineteen-hundreds by the sculptor George Grey Barnard, who collected architectural fragments from abbeys and churches built by monastic orders in the twelfth century. Barnard was famously unskilled when it came to managing his money, and, in 1925, he had to sell the cloisters to John D. Rockefeller, Jr. They were eventually donated, along with a large collection of medieval art works, to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The buildings are beautiful and tranquil but fundamentally incongruous (modern architecture mixed with bits of decaying monasteries, gathered from meadows in Catalonia and France). This makes the Cloisters feel both unmoored from and tethered to time.
Dacus had suggested the spot; it was her second visit in less than a year. “I came here this summer with Phoebe, for the first time, and we took a tour,” she said. “As you go through different eras, you notice so many of the same themes.” That idea—of a grand continuum, in which the circumstances change but all of our big human feelings (heartache, joy, unease, panic, contentment) remain the same, across time and vast distances—felt germane to her new songs. “All love feels new and one of a kind, and it is,” she said. “But also it’s the most ancient feeling.” When I pointed out to Dacus that “Forever Is a Feeling” is essentially a concept record about the agony and ecstasy of romance, she let out a groan. “It makes my stomach hurt,” she said. “It felt amazing to write. But now, on the brink of sharing it—I could throw up. Every single day, I’m just, like, ‘I can’t believe this is the job. Just plumb the depths and give it away!’ ”
We wandered along one cloister, stopping to admire a potted oleander with a sign that read “POISON.” “That was my great-uncle’s last name,” Dacus said, briefly assuming a thick Southern accent. “Ohhhh-lander,” she drawled. (Her father’s family is from Mississippi.) We settled on a stone bench in the chapter house, once a central part of Notre-Dame-de-Pontaut, a Benedictine monastery established in 1115, in Aquitaine. Every morning, the monks gathered there, arranging themselves on the long stone benches, to discuss the matters of the day. Now tourists and school groups inched past, whispering. Though no one approached Dacus directly, I couldn’t help but notice how often passersby—especially twentysomethings with cool haircuts and hand tattoos—silently angled their phones toward her.
Dacus and Baker have mostly kept their relationship private. Dacus didn’t want to hide it, exactly, and anyone who pays attention to her new lyrics could probably piece it together, but she was still working out just how much she wanted to disclose into my little recording machine. Boygenius has an unusually fervent and engaged fan base—perhaps because the band became very popular during the pandemic, when parasocial relationships were all we had, or perhaps because they make confessional music about intimate entanglements among various genders, which can be rare to find in popular music. In recent years, the scrutiny has become intense. There are long and detailed discussion threads online, speculating about the romance between Dacus and Baker. Dacus said that her followers have been respectful of her boundaries, but “it only takes a handful to make your life feel like a really easily threatened thing.” Then she added, “I’ve been practicing not reinforcing that narrative to myself.”
I told Dacus that I might not have asked about her love life if it weren’t so plainly central to the songs. “It’s been interesting, because I want to protect what is precious in my life, but also to be honest, and make art that’s true,” she said. “I think maybe a part of it is just trusting that it’s not at risk.” She paused. “Maybe a healthier way to think about it is that it’s not actually fragile. These songs are about different people. But, you know, ‘Most Wanted Man in West Tennessee’—what are you gonna do?” (Baker was born and brought up outside Memphis.)
That song is jangly and rich, featuring electric guitar, pump organ, and synthesizers. Tonally, it reminds me a little of Big Star’s “Thirteen,” in part because it captures something about the tenuousness of new love:
Dacus said that she has only ever found romantic love with friends or collaborators. “How are you doing romance without friendship?” she said, laughing. “I can’t imagine. That feels so hollow. It makes me feel ill! Someone that’s not my friend? Are you serious? Almost every relationship I have been in, we’ve had some business or creative dealings. I don’t mean this just sexually, but it turns me on.” She went on, “To have your minds meet on something, and be, like, ‘Oh, my gosh, you said what I couldn’t say. I love your mind.’ ”
One of my favorite tracks on the new record is “For Keeps,” a gentle, cottony wisp of a song, barely more than two minutes long, just Dacus and an acoustic guitar. “For Keeps” is about falling in love with someone who is fundamentally unavailable to you, or maybe you’re unavailable to each other, who knows—something doesn’t align.
The song begins with a sharp intake of breath. Dacus’s vocals are close and unhurried. There’s a hint of a tremble in her tone. I explained to her that I’d been listening to the song in my car earlier that morning, when a flock of Canada geese flew low and heavy over the highway, and I found myself weeping, suddenly, inelegantly, because the whole thing just felt so unlikely—the meaty old Canada goose is not the most probable flier, and we don’t know how migratory birds find their way south, instinctively navigating between two poles. Yet there they went, perfectly aligned, hungry for warmth. The song ends with a sigh of resignation:
That final (and devastating) “for keeps” might refer to the impossibility of the situation, to the star-crossed-ness of it all—something big is keeping them apart—or to just how formidably difficult it is to sustain love over time. I found it instructive: love anyway. Take off.
“Hearing that—thank God,” Dacus said. She continued, “I want there to be different conversations about love than the ones that are happening. I worry that when I talk about this I get really abstract or rote—that it’s impossible to talk about because it’s been made into a corny, commodified thing. Love is such a money-maker, it’s just not always pleasant,” she said. “Whenever you love anything a lot, you’re booked for grief.” On “Best Guess,” a sweet, hazy new song, Dacus sings about embracing the chanciness of it all:
Dacus and I eventually left the chapter house, walking around until we found the Unicorn Tapestries, a series of seven pieces, woven from wool, silk, and metallic thread, likely designed in France and produced in Brussels toward the end of the fifteenth century. No one knows exactly who made them, or how to definitively interpret their narrative, but there’s something instantly striking about the iconography: a white unicorn is pursued, retaliates, is lured by a maiden, and then is caught, encircled by a fence, and chained to a tree trunk. Scholars have suggested that the tapestries might be an allegory of Christ, or, more likely, of marriage—all the ways in which love and monogamy require subjugation, submission, capture. I’d told Dacus earlier that I wanted to get a picture of them for my three-year-old daughter, who enjoys unicorns, though the more I looked at the series the less inclined I felt to take a photo.
We wandered out onto the West Terrace, which overlooks the Hudson. To the left was the George Washington Bridge, and across the river stood the sheer cliffs of the Palisades. We leaned against a low rock wall, buttoning our coats against the wind. “I’ve been asking people how they define love,” Dacus said. “Everybody’s answers are so interesting. My therapist had my favorite definition so far—that love is the connective tissue between all of us that’s easy to forget. I like that. Because it means it’s just there.”
Dacus was born in the spring of 1995 and adopted by parents who brought her up in Mechanicsville, Virginia, a suburb of Richmond. “My mom was adopted, too,” Dacus told me. “My parents always said, ‘All of the universe had to align for you to be in our family. What are the chances, and how perfect is this?’ I had friends who would say, ‘Oh, you’re like Little Orphan Annie. I’m so sorry your parents didn’t want you.’ I was, like, ‘No, my parents really did want me. You’re probably a mistake.’ ” She went on, “As a second grader, I was just a little bitch about it.” Dacus has considered adopting a child herself, or perhaps becoming a foster parent one day. She is less inclined to have biological children. “I don’t think I would have the speed to change in the necessary ways,” she said.
Growing up, she had limited information about her birth mother. “On my birthday every year, my mom was, like, ‘I’ll tell you anything, but only ask if you really want to know.’ It felt like I really had to be choosy,” she said. When Dacus turned eighteen, she received a large file of photographs and documents. “It was overwhelming, but also—wow. These are just strangers, out in the world,” she said, of her biological parents. At nineteen, Dacus met her birth mother, and they quickly forged a relationship. “We’re very similar, more similar in personality than the family that raised me,” she said. “I have a brother who is biological to my parents. I think they saw themselves in him, and saw aspects of each other that frustrated them. I think he had a harder time growing up because he was related to them. Whereas they gave me the respect early on that I was an individual, and they were just finding out who I was.”
By the age of eight, Dacus was writing songs. Her earliest musical proclivities ran from classic (Led Zeppelin and the Cure) to fleeting and contemporary (“Fergalicious” and the pop-punk band All Time Low). Her family is Baptist (though their church eventually transitioned to a nondenominational Protestant sect), and she grew up singing religious music. She described herself as “very, very dedicated” to God as a child, but, by the time she was nineteen and studying film at Virginia Commonwealth University, “it just kind of sublimated. It’s not that I’m not the same person. It’s that my idea of God actually got so big that it didn’t have boundaries anymore. I just felt like I had insane hubris for even trying to understand it.” On “Most Wanted Man,” Dacus sings:
“That happens,” Dacus said. “I’ll be, like—what is this? I don’t even understand it. I don’t think there’s any work to be done to stop it.” At the Cloisters, we had briefly discussed the work of Thomas Merton, the poet and Trappist monk who wrote often about the containment or rechannelling of desire, although, as I’d told Dacus, scholars assume that he broke his vow of celibacy. “O.K. Cool. Respect,” Dacus had said, laughing. Her own relationship to religion forced her to contend with an inclination toward stifling (or at least judging) normal feelings of yearning and lust. “I was raised, generally, to think wanting things was bad—it was of the body, of the flesh. You should just be content with the life you’re given,” she said. “That’s a good practice, because it helps you look around and realize that most of the time you have everything you need. But becoming O.K. with wanting things is big. That’s not evil, that’s not bad—that’s actually life.”
Later, I asked Dacus if growing up in the church had affected the way she thought about her sexuality. She replied that it had delayed the development of her entire sense of self. “Thinking of myself at all felt selfish and vain,” she wrote in a text message. “Maybe I was subconsciously protecting myself from becoming a pariah, my whole community was rooted in the church, pretty much everyone I loved was there, so it’s not something I could jeopardize.” She went on, “I have journal entries from when I was seven wishing I could just marry my girl friends and bemoaning that it could never happen because I wasn’t, and would never be, a lesbian.” She officially came out, she said, when she was nineteen, during an interview with NPR. “I said, ‘I’m kinda queer,’ ” she remembered, laughing. She described the realization as “a slow fade. Friends of mine were just, like, ‘You’re gay,’ repeatedly, for a long time.”
Dacus eventually dropped out of V.C.U. There had been an administrative issue with her scholarship, but she also felt stalled out and understimulated. She got a day job at a store called Richmond Camera, where she edited and prepared school photos to be printed on mugs and key chains. She was writing songs every day, and described the process as a way of talking to herself; the precise mechanics of the work remain mysterious to her. “I don’t want to think about it too hard, because it just happens,” she said. “If I knew the source, I would go, and I would probably tap it out. Someone once spoke about it as seeing a wild animal in your back yard, and then being as still as possible so that it’ll stay around.”
In 2016, Dacus released “No Burden,” her first LP, on Egghunt Records, a local label; a few months later, the album was rereleased by Matador Records. Dacus’s early songs are spare and haunting, but it was evident, even then, that she had a knack for writing the sorts of hooks and choruses that land like a gut punch. “What I like most about her is the intention she puts behind everything. No decision is made without meaning,” the singer and songwriter Claire Cottrill, who records as Clairo, told me recently. “She’s someone who really listens, which is what makes her a great artist.”
The record appeared on several year-end lists. Dacus played a Tiny Desk concert, performed at Lollapalooza, and booked a series of gigs opening for Baker, who had just released “Sprained Ankle,” her début album. Bridgers, whose first record, “Stranger in the Alps,” came out in 2017, also ended up as an opener on that tour. The three of them—all in their early twenties and playing the sort of moody, rickety guitar rock typically made by lanky white men—became fast friends. Eventually, they decided to record together. In March, 2018, Dacus released “Historian,” her second album, and, seven months later, boygenius released its self-titled EP.
In 2019, Dacus moved from Richmond to Philadelphia, where she shared a five-bedroom house with seven roommates; in 2021, she released “Home Video,” her third album. It’s a gutsy, thoughtful meditation on coming of age and the often excruciating ways that teen-agers grasp at identity, desperate to discover who they are. “Her work has the gift of being able to fall upon the inanimate or the mundane, and pull from it the startlingly intimate,” the singer Hozier, who provides guest vocals on “Bullseye,” a new song, told me. “I’ve always loved the eye through which her lyrical voice finds the world.” That April, Dacus performed the single “Hot & Heavy” on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” which was still filming remotely. She stood onstage in an empty theatre with her band, looking regal and plaintive, wearing a long black dress and crimson lipstick. It’s a song about a teen-age love affair—“Hot and heavy in the basement of your parents’ place,” Dacus sings on the chorus—that goes sour: “The most that I could give to you is nothing at all / The best that I could offer was to miss your calls.” Dacus is an understated performer, verging on laconic, but her stillness is transfixing, and feels true to the way that desire itself is often a paralyzing force. All three members of boygenius are good at capturing the awkwardness and intensity of sex, but, whereas Bridgers and Baker tend to deploy dissonance and tension, Dacus’s delivery is softer, quieter, more peaceful.
Dacus had not anticipated the wild success of “The Record,” and, for a while, boygenius took priority over her solo career. “We had these big goals of playing sick shows. But it immediately outpaced our expectations. We just had to adjust. I’m still shocked,” Dacus said. “That’s something all of us talk about and work on. I feel dissociated. I also feel like it could go away in a second. Because, if it can show up in a second, it can go away in a second.”
In the summer of 2023, Barack Obama posted a playlist of his favorite songs, which included boygenius’s “Not Strong Enough,” a track about not being tough or steady or sane enough to sustain a relationship. (“Not Strong Enough” is emblematic of a slight but recurring theme in the boygenius catalogue: “I’m sorry, I can’t, don’t hate me.”) Obama’s playlists are always suspiciously well calibrated—John Coltrane and Ice Spice and Leonard Cohen and Rosalía . . . sure. But most artists still find it a funny thrill to be included. Dacus retweeted the playlist, adding the phrase “war criminal :( .” The words immediately became a meme. At one point, the journalist Taylor Lorenz posted an Instagram story with a photo of Joe Biden accompanied by the phrase, an event that likely contributed to her departure from the Washington Post. “My issue was being used in a personality campaign without my consent,” Dacus told me one evening. “I was actually really surprised that people don’t already know that every President is a war criminal, and, also, war itself is criminal.” She went on, “I would say the same about Biden, I would say the same about Trump.”
In the fall of 2024, as boygenius was finishing its first world tour, Dacus and Baker moved together to Los Angeles. “It’s so interesting how home just moves,” she said. “I was once debating with a therapist whether I should move or not. She was, like, ‘Your sense of home might move before you do.’ L.A. just felt like the strongest magnet. I’m expecting that to change.” She added, “I anticipate wanting to be back in more rural areas, like maybe back to the South at some point.” She had been missing aspects of the East Coast lately—the rolling farms of rural Virginia, “the outlying areas, the apple orchards. I miss dense foliage. I miss shade,” Dacus said. It was hard to tell how urgent any of this was. “Life is long, or short. . . . We don’t know.”
Dacus was travelling during the L.A. fires, in January, and a friend had asked if she wanted anything from her house removed for safekeeping. It seemed as though, at any moment, the winds might shift, threatening her neighborhood. “I care about everything,” Dacus said. “I’m very sentimental—I could mourn each individual sweater for its own reason. But the one thing where I was, like, ‘Please grab this’ was my journals.” I thought of the first verse from “Trust,” a single from “No Burden.” It evokes the gulf between what we think and what we say, what we want and what we do:
A few weeks later, I met Dacus at the Huntington, an art museum, library, and botanical garden in San Marino, just northeast of L.A. The fires had largely subsided, but the city felt strange: hushed and stricken in some corners, business as usual in others. “Today, before I came here, I had on my shitty clothes and my mask and I was cleaning my back porch,” Dacus said. “I was just looking at that ash, thinking, I can’t believe this is somebody’s house.”
The Huntington estate was purchased in 1903 by Henry Edward Huntington, a railroad tycoon; he established a library and a museum in 1919, and they opened to the public in 1928, after his death. Huntington started collecting fine art in his sixties, guided by his second wife, Arabella. (A 1938 article in Life described Huntington’s collection of eighteenth-century British portraits as “far and away the greatest group . . . ever assembled by any one man.”) He also oversaw the cultivation of nearly a hundred and twenty acres of gardens. Some of the plants are rare, and theft has become a problem. The museum had begun placing “THIS PLANT WAS STOLEN” signs in gardens where specimens had been pilfered.
“I really, really like it here,” Dacus said, as we made our way toward the Chinese Garden, fifteen acres winding around a koi pond. We stopped to admire narcissi, flowering quinces, and some freaky chunks of limestone, described by the Huntington as “unusual rocks with energy.” “Julien and I are members. Last time, we brought a blanket and snacks and our books, and lay in the garden for, like, two hours, just napping and reading,” she said. “We have memberships because Phoebe gave them to us for my birthday.” (On “Garden Song,” a smoky, aching number from “Punisher,” Bridgers, an L.A. native, sings, “I don’t know when you got taller / See our reflection in the water / Off a bridge at the Huntington / I hopped the fence when I was seventeen.”) It was hard not to think of the gardens themselves as a study of change. “That’s the thing about nature,” Dacus said. “Every single day, the air is different, the light’s different. Things are growing.”
Boygenius is currently inactive. “The decision to take time off came even before the record came out. We always said, ‘One year,’ ” Dacus said. It’s not easy to say no to more money, more attention. Yet the band had predetermined the time frame on the basis of ideas of self-preservation. “Let’s protect our friendship, let’s protect our energy, let’s not have each other feel pressure to keep it going for the others,” she said. “It was so much fun, and I think we ended at the perfect time.”
We left the Huntington at dusk, and headed to Houston’s, a steak house in Pasadena. It’s the type of restaurant—dark-wood panelling, red leather, a flickering neon sign out front—where people clink Martinis, celebrate anniversaries, close deals. We sat in a booth and began disassembling a fried artichoke. Our conversation wound back, perhaps inevitably, toward relationships—how easy it is to talk about romantic love as an exquisite and transformative experience, a thing that buoys and saves you. Of course, it often sucks. Maybe it even mostly sucks. “It’s painful to get to a beautiful place sometimes,” is how Dacus put it.
The next morning, Dacus was directing a music video for “Best Guess.” I arrived on set—a cavernous soundstage near LAX—just before lunchtime. A few weeks earlier, she had posted an entreaty on social media, calling for anyone identifying as a “hot masc” to audition for the video. “I was, like, ‘Hope you like the snippet. Send to the hot masc in your life,’ ” she said. Dacus received more than five thousand replies. In recent months, some online queer communities have been opining about what they say is a lack of hot mascs. “So I wanted to highlight some cool masc people,” she said. “I thought that TikTok would be the perfect place for it, because I needed people who are comfortable looking into a camera, which is truly a skill set that some people have and some people don’t.” She added, laughing, “Everybody here has it. I’m the least suave person at this shoot, for sure.”
Now here they were—the artist and dancer Janae Holster; the TikTok star Mattie Westbrouck; Naomi McPherson, of MUNA; and the singer and guitarist Towa Bird, among others, including the actor and model Cara Delevingne—wearing suits, posing, grinning, cheering. The pop star Chappell Roan, who has advocated aggressively for L.G.B.T.Q.+ rights, told me that Dacus “cares deeply for her community. She shows up for them in every way she can. She is an artist who gives a fuck.”
At lunch, Dacus and I brought our plates into a dressing room. “One of my favorite videos of all time is the ‘Queen’ video by Janelle Monáe,” Dacus said. “It has Erykah Badu in it. Her whole thing is black and white and a little red. They shot in front of a flat wall. I’ve never made a music video like that. I’m always interested in doing a thing that a lot of people have done, in a way that I don’t think anyone has yet, in a way that I wish I’d seen at a young age.”
For the video, Dacus and her hot mascs had been playing poker and darts, arm-wrestling, boxing, puffing cigars, lifting weights. There was a loosely choreographed group dance. Dacus seemed happy, self-assured, and at ease. “Every idea that I had is happening, and kind of how I thought it would, too,” she said. “I feel really good doing this.” ♦
An earlier version of this story misrepresented Dacus’s audition call for the “Best Guess” music video.
