lucy dacus home video tour setlist

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Lucy Dacus: Tiny Desk (Home) Concert

Credit: Courtesy of artist

The Tiny Desk is working from home for the foreseeable future. Introducing NPR Music's Tiny Desk (home) concerts, bringing you performances from across the country and the world. It's the same spirit — stripped-down sets, an intimate setting — just a different space.

Lucy Dacus sits at a very special desk for this Tiny Desk (home) concert. And though she's played the NPR Tiny Desk twice — first in 2016 and a few years later with Julien Baker and Phoebe Bridgers as boygenius — the desk at Maggie L. Walker Governor's School likely holds deeper memories. Much of her third album, Home Video , is centered on her school years in Richmond, Va., and the friendships formed and shattered there. During those high school years, she met her musical mate, guitarist Jacob Blizard (seated on the right side of the screen), and the audio engineer capturing all these songs, Collin Pastore.

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Rewind, be kind: on 'home video,' lucy dacus writes her own rules for friendship.

Lucy Dacus opens with "Brando," a song about young adulthood, and for Lucy, understanding how others perceive her. "You called me cerebral," she sings, "I didn't know what that meant." She and her band play "VBS," which Lucy explains "means vacation bible school, for all you heathen folks." It's Lucy, as a young Christian, thinking about her faith. Then, four acoustic guitars gather for "Going Going Gone," as Ricardo Lagomasino moves from the drum kit and Dominic Angelella puts down his bass. Sarah Goldstone helms the keyboards. For the final tune, the band vanishes as Lucy plays the most troubling song from Home Video, " Thumbs," a song where Lucy fantasizes about murdering a friend's estranged father. It's a tune I often find too disturbing to listen to. But it's also an example of why artists create — to deal with profound issues. When successful (and "Thumbs" certainly is), these types of songs can move writers and listeners to think hard and understand.

• "Going Going Gone"
• Lucy Dacus: guitar, vocals
• Jacob Blizard: guitar
• Dominic Angelella: bass
• Ricardo Lagomasino: drums
• Sarah Goldstone: keys, vocals
• Video: Jordan Rodericks (SpangTV)
• Audio: Collin Pastore

TINY DESK TEAM

• Producer: Bob Boilen
• Video Producer: Kara Frame
• Audio Mastering: Josh Rogosin
• Associate Producer: Bobby Carter
• Tiny Production Team: Maia Stern, Gabrielle Pierre
• Executive Producer: Keith Jenkins
• Senior VP, Programming: Anya Grundmann

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Published: 2021/04/14 by Nick Manduley

Lucy Dacus Announces New Album ‘Home Video,’ Sets North American Tour Dates

Photo by Jordan Rodericks

Singer-songwriter Lucy Dacus has announced her third LP Home Video and released her newest single and video for “Hot & Heavy.” Home Video is due out June 25th on Matador, and Dacus performed “Hot & Heavy” from the album on the Apr. 13 episode of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert (see video below).

Additionally, Dacus has announced a North American tour for this fall with supporting acts Bartees Strange, Shamir, and Bachelor. The tour will kick off at The National in Richmond, VA on Sept. 10 and conclude at NYC’s Brooklyn Steel on Oct. 25. The full list of dates can be found below. Tickets go on sale this Friday, April 16, at 10 a.m. local time. 

Home Video is the follow up to 2018’s Historian and Dacus’s 2016 debut No Burden . The new album shows an intimate level of vulnerability, as it’s centered around a nostalgic examination of Dacus’s coming-of-age years in Richmond, VA; Home Video captures the volatile junction in adolescence where one experiences a wide spectrum of emotions as they figure out who they are, how others fit in their lives, and vice versa. 

Dacus recorded Home Video in August 2019 at Nashville’s Trace Horse Studios. She collaborated with Jacob Blizard, Collin Pastore, and Jake Finch during the recording process; Dacus’s boygenius bandmates Julien Baker and Phoebe Bridgers contributed vocals on two tracks as well. The full album was mixed and mastered by Shawn Everett and Bob Ludwig respectively. 

Pre-order Home Video today with this link , and check out the video for “Hot & Heavy” by clicking here . Check out Dacus’ Colbert performance and the full list of tour dates below.

Lucy Dacus’ Home Video Tour: (on sale Fri. April 16 @ 10am local time) Fri. Sept. 10 – Richmond, VA @ The National (Julien Baker Headline/Lucy Support, + special guests) Sat. Sept. 11 – Richmond, VA @ The National (Lucy Headline/Julien Baker Support, + special guests) Mon. Sept. 13 – Saxapahaw, NC @ Haw River Ballroom % Tue. Sept. 14 – Atlanta, GA @ Terminal West % Wed. Sept. 15 – Nashville, TN @ Brooklyn Bowl % Fri. Sept. 17 – Dallas, TX @ Trees % Sat. Sept. 18 – Houston, TX @ White Oak Music Hall- Downstairs % Sun. Sept. 19 – Austin, TX @ Scoot Inn % Mon. Sept. 20 – San Antonio, TX @ Paper Tiger % Wed. Sept. 22 – Tucson, AZ @ 191 Toole % Fri. Sept. 24 – Los Angeles, CA @ The Theatre at Ace Hotel % Sat. Sept. 25 – Santa Ana, CA @ The Observatory OC % Mon. Sept. 27 – San Francisco, CA @ The Fillmore % Thu. Sept. 30 – Vancouver, BC @ Hollywood Theatre $ Fri. Oct. 1 – Portland, OR @ Wonder Ballroom $ Sat. Oct. 2 – Seattle, WA @ Neptune Theatre $ Tue. Oct. 5 – Salt Lake City, UT @ Urban Lounge $ Fri. Oct. 8 – Iowa City, IA @ The Englert Theatre $ Sat. Oct. 9 – Minneapolis, MN @ First Avenue $ Mon. Oct. 11 – Chicago, IL @ The Vic Theatre $ Tue. Oct. 12 – Columbus , OH @ Newport Music Hall $ Thu. Oct. 14 – Toronto, ON @ The Opera House $ Fri. Oct. 15 – Montreal, QC @ L’Astral $ Sat. Oct. 16 – Boston, MA @ House of Blues $ Mon. Oct. 18 – Burlington, VT @ Higher Ground $ Wed. Oct. 20 – Philadelphia, PA @ Union Transfer ^ Fri. Oct. 22 – Washington, DC @ 9:30 Club $ Mon. Oct. 25 – Brooklyn, NY @ Brooklyn Steel

% = w/ Bachelor $ = w/ Bartees Strange ^ = w/ Shamir

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Concert Review: Lucy Dacus Dazzles in First Hometown Home Video Tour Date

Last Wednesday, October 20th, 2021, Lucy Dacus and her Home Video Tour opened the first of two nights at Philadelphia’s Union Transfer to a roaring weeknight crowd. Following local opener Shamir , Dacus and her band brought their signature somber, folksy brand of indie rock for a 2-hour set. The audience hung on every enchanting note she sang, shouting along to iconic choruses as if it were their own stories.

Dacus opened with “Triple Dog Dare” and “First Time” – two tracks from her latest record Home Video . Her third album, released this summer, is a memoir of her coming-of-age in the suburbs of Richmond, Virginia. The lyrics reflect a constant dialogue between queerness and faith, embracing feelings of awkwardness and isolation through her teenage years. It was a treat to hear her live, where her uncompromising emotion enamored a sold-out crowd of nearly 1,200. 

Although she grew up in Virginia, Dacus has recently called the City of Brotherly Love her home. In fact, the October 20th show was her first hometown show since moving to Philadelphia (where all but one of her bandmates have lived at some point or another, according to her monologue). Dacus has no problem making herself at home on Philly’s stages, relating easily to fans like the one who shouted: “you mean everything to me!” 

“I hope people yell that to you at your work,” she replied. Later on in the show someone passed their rainbow pride flag fan on stage, which prompted Lucy Dacus to do an impromptu choreography with her mic in the other hand. 

The set was a mix of tracks from throughout her career, but the songs from her newest record took center stage. Her live show paints a picture of how dynamic the music really is: a steady folk-rock rhythm underscores Dacus’ ethereal vocal lines while accents of bluesy guitar licks cut through their space. Her performance of “VBS” – dedicated to those in the audience who went to Vacation Bible School – illustrated the intense range of emotions in her songs. When the line “ There’s nothing you can do but the only thing you found / Playing Slayer at full volume helps to block it out ” came, the stage went red and I could feel that primal teen rage as the band rocked out for a moment.

While her backing quartet of musicians is nothing to gloss over, songs that featured Lucy Dacus’ solo ability were what dazzled myself and many other concertgoers. Over graceful sustained synth textures, Dacus’ voice easily carried the flood of feelings in her tunes. From within the crowd of congregants, it was as if Dacus was singing her sermon with a church organ backing her. How could you not feel bonded to a singer that pours her emotions out for everyone to cling to? 

My highlight from the show was “Yours & Mine,” a tune that was preempted with a show of thanks for each audience member being vaccinated and wearing masks. As the band glided through the song that was written in response to the 2015 Baltimore Freddie Gray protests, the “ Take care of you and yours ” line felt particularly poignant. Dacus is an artist who knows when to sing the right song at the right time. The show closed perfectly with “Night Shift,” a song where Dacus’ haunting voice lulls audience members until distorted guitars and driving drums leave nothing un-rocked. 

It felt like – at least for just one night – Union Transfer was the Church of Lucy Dacus. Her Wednesday night service encore was solo acoustic, with a cover of Regina Spektor’s “Summer in the City” and a new, unreleased song that everyone obliged not to record. Dacus skips between the line of secular and religious constantly in her music, but ultimately carries a sacred weight in each line she sings. Welcome home, Lucy Dacus – we couldn’t be happier to have you here.

Special thanks to Pitch Perfect PR for providing WQHS with press access to the show. 

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The Wisdom of Lucy Dacus, Body and Soul

By Laura Regensdorf

In the middle of May, not long after her 26th birthday, Lucy Dacus found herself doing a relatable schlep. “It all felt very New York: Get off the train, go pick up fashion in a big bag, and bring it to my house,” the singer-songwriter said. She was curled up in a leather club chair inside the Brooklyn rowhouse she was calling home for a few days. Alexandra Mitchell, “who’s been my friend forever—I’m making her be a stylist for me,” Dacus explained. A post-vaccine world calls for clothes, after all. Her third album, Home Video , was then a month from release; ahead of her lay a docket of magazine shoots and late-night appearances, followed by this fall’s largely sold-out tour . (She headlines three shows at Brooklyn Steel this week, with another at Washington, D.C.’s 9:30 Club.) “I borrowed some Margiela dresses from a friend of hers,” Dacus said, with a glowing ember’s sense of possibility.

Dacus, whose apotheosis from indie darling to big-venue headliner has been buoyed by critical acclaim and a fan base that knows all the words, is a relative newcomer to dressing up. (The size 4 samples from most brands don’t help, she pointed out.) In truth, she isn’t used to being in front of the camera. There are clues embedded in her songwriting. Her 2016 debut No Burden —recorded in college over winter break as part of her longtime guitarist Jacob Blizard ’s school project, and later re-released by Matador Records—includes the upbeat track “I Don’t Want to Be Funny Anymore.” In a self-aware bid to trade one female stereotype for another, she sings, “I got a too short skirt, maybe I can be the cute one / Is there room in the band?” 

There’s a similar line in “Brando,” off the new album, about a teenage friendship with a guy who relished his role as consigliere, schooling Dacus on classic movies and cultural arcana. (Growing up in Mechanicsville, Virginia, outside Richmond—her dad a graphic designer, her mom a music teacher—Dacus wasn’t allowed to watch the news.) “You called me cerebral / I didn’t know what you meant,” her voice rings out over syncopated guitar chords. “But now I do. Would it have killed you / to call me pretty instead?” 

Dacus, backlit by afternoon sun, was luminous in an unassuming way. I was surprised to see her without makeup only because her public image—the press portraits and Tiny Desk videos and YouTube footage of her sets—is almost always anchored by a precisely drawn red lip. Five or six years ago, Mitchell handed her a tube of MAC Ruby Woo, as a kind of talisman for shows. “Even if I was wearing my pajamas onstage, it tricked people into thinking that everything else was a choice,” Dacus said. “I feel rattled when I don’t have it.” 

Dacus on the road this fall. 

That spring day, though, she seemed wholly at ease, positioned on the precipice between the pandemic’s home-bound stretch and what lay beyond. Dacus described some musician friends who were “literally reading books about performance in order to prepare themselves,” she said. It had been so long to be holed up, away from the crowds and lights. But Dacus was angling to plan less, to loosen her sense of composure. Her excitement around dressing up was rooted in a sense of fun. If faith had led her to believe that “my body is just a sack that my soul is in,” as she put it, maybe fashion could ground her back in her skin. She mentioned the exuberant dresses by London-based designers Molly Goddard and Simone Rocha, which read more as artworks than decoration. “It almost feels like I’m daring myself to show up in ways that make me uncomfortable just to find out that I can.”  

Home Video arrived on June 25. The name felt in sync with the wave of ’90s nostalgia in culture, with Dacus, born in 1995, as one of the younger emissaries. “My dad took all the home videos,” she said by phone in early spring, calling from the Philadelphia house she shares with six roommates. “They got a camera, like, the week I was born, so I was the new toy as a baby, and the camera was a new toy in terms of technology.” The album’s rollout riffed on the medium. The cover art shows an empty movie theater, evoking the matinee screenings of A Streetcar Named Desire and Casablanca recounted in “Brando.” Her single “Thumbs,” with its quietly gutting lyrics about imagined revenge against a friend’s father, arrived to a handful of recipients as a novelty VHS tape . In the pre-pandemic touring days, Dacus had often closed out sets with the song, asking onlookers not to break the spell with a bootleg recording. A fan account on Twitter had sprung up, its sole purpose to ask when the song would be released.

The cover art for Home Video.

The impulse to rewind comes naturally to Dacus. “I’m always interested in memory because it’s fiction, but also it’s the realest thing we have,” she told me. Dacus has long drawn on life experience for her finely stitched lyrics, but Home Video is the first album that sent her directly to her childhood journals, with their time-capsule scribbles about crushes, embarrassments, and God. “VBS,” the fourth track, recalls a time at Vacation Bible School when she met her first boyfriend, a Slayer superfan with a complicated home life. “I don’t want to blow up Christian teens’ spot about this,” she told me, but “church camp is where a bunch of my friends lost their virginity. It’s seedier than you think because kids are kids and they’re going to figure out how, no matter what.” It’s not the flattened experience that people imagine. “Saying ‘I grew up in the church’ is the shorthand for something that actually should have more of a longhand look at it.” 

One place on the record where Dacus unspools that thread is “First Time.” For her, it’s a personal victory to talk about sex, “about physical, clumsy stuff because I feel like I always tend to write songs in the realm of the mind and not the body,” she told me. The track starts off with a mechanistic churn before the drums rush in, followed by her voice, coolly in control. She has a way of hinting at past vulnerability without ceding present-day ground. “I’m a starfish on the kitchen floor,” she sings, summoning the feeling of hard tile, a transgressive thrill. Later on: “I showed you the way, even though I’d never been.” The line is a Rorschach blot, like a lot of Home Video lyrics; in one light, it suggests the blurred edge between agency and accommodation.

I asked Dacus how that kind of autobiographical songwriting sits with a churchgoing family. “I think that it has such a consistent groove that it can kind of gloss over you,” she said, explaining that her brother, a drummer, connected with that driving pulse. Her parents “haven’t gone deep on any of the meanings yet,” she said. “I’m letting them make that choice.” 

Fidelity to text—to parsing out its possible readings, with or without a tether to truth—runs deep for Dacus. The church she grew up in was academically minded, with sermons rooted in linguistics and history. “It was almost anthropological, which I’m still interested in. Everything else felt a little emotionally manipulative,” she said. When she left for college in Richmond, she started a Bible group with friends, clinging to “this idea that ‘I’m going to change Christianity from the inside.’” But in time, she drifted away, using that framework for other means of inquiry. Dacus churned through nearly a book a day in early quarantine. “Not War and Peace —that took a while,” she laughed. She ticked through recent favorites. Braiding Sweetgrass, by Robin Wall Kimmerer. Garth Greenwell: “Probably one of the best sex writers alive,” she said. “I’ve been reading a lot of Mary Oliver. I would be so pleased if she ends up being an inspiration just because the feeling I get reading Mary Oliver is so unique—just so essential and grounded.” 

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But Dacus is not possessive over her own stories. “Night Shift,” the opening track off her sophomore album Historian, ends with the line, “In five years I hope the songs feel like covers / Dedicated to new lovers.” It means one thing in the context of a slow-building breakup anthem—old memories overwritten by new, like a VHS tape with a label full of scratched-out entries. But in the real-life sense, as fans metabolize her words, Dacus finds it cathartic. “When I play ‘Night Shift’ live and people sing it with me, it’s like I’m singing their song also,” she said, describing an onstage feeling that was then still a past and future sensation. “That’s been one of the most magical transferences of power in my life, just to let other people take ownership of something that matters a lot to me.” 

On September 27, Dacus posted a series of selfies from San Francisco’s August Hall. “until we meet again giant mirror,” read her caption to a slideshow of triumphant gestures—kicking, swaying, kneeling like a princely ballet dancer, holding and then enjoying a sacrament of bread and cheese. She’s wearing boots, a black tank top, and her reinstalled red lip (Lisa Eldridge’s Velvet Ribbon is a new favorite). But the writer Carmen Maria Machado called out the showstopper: “brb googling ‘gold, wide-legged, pleated pants.’” Dacus was quick on the reply. “brunello cucinelli my dude,” she wrote, along with heart and flame emojis.

Dacus backstage at San Francisco’s August Hall. “I really want to show up really joyfully as a not-skinny person,” she said ahead of tour.

That’s one unexpected part of these conversations with Dacus, which loop—like the album—around the concept of memory, around discomfort and its ease over time. I thought back on something she said in the spring, reflecting on the ambivalence about her body: “I had a thing about looking in mirrors for a long time. ‘I don’t want to be vain, so I won’t look in a mirror.’” The comment felt eerily familiar to me, as if she’d plucked it from my own head. It’s a dip into the uncanny that her listeners know well. 

A week later I reached Dacus over Zoom. She was in Iowa City, teeing up for another run of shows. The connection was spotty, so she vowed to stay put on a grassy hilltop, the powder blue sky behind her. “I am wearing a Balenciaga shirt, so that makes me feel fancy,” she said, referring to a black-and-white piece she had scored off The RealReal. The name of the resale site had a funny resonance, given that Dacus was searching for a way to convey her delight in this new phase of self-presentation. “Maybe you picked up on me kind of scratching my head, not really knowing how to exist,” she said, reflecting on our early talks. But now, following a hopscotch of cities, “what has made it easier is realizing that it’s all a performance. Even if you’re trying to be authentic, it’s still a choice—and that you can be authentic and not represent every part of yourself.”  

Selective revelation, without much fuss, is becoming a hallmark for Dacus. (This summer she eloquently wrote about queerness with purposefully hazy contours.) On tour she is also highlighting latent facets, playing a deferred game of dress-up. “I’ve been saying at shows that I’m in my gown-and-jewels era,” she said with a smile. She recently thrifted a cache of 1960s Czech costume jewelry that came from a defunct burlesque theater. And for a photo shoot, she finally slipped into a Simone Rocha dress , with dainty sleeves and a toile-inspired print. “It’s funny to be kind of performing femininity so much when I feel the least attached to my identity as a woman,” Dacus said. “I really, really like this blue, puffy-sleeved gown that Sea New York gave me. It just makes me feel like a fairy godmother.” 

Dacus, slipping into sparkles. 

In one sense Dacus has been waving her wand. On September 2, as many reeled with the news of the draconian Texas abortion law, the musician announced that all the proceeds from her upcoming shows in the state would support abortion funds. “I just tweeted it, within the same 30 seconds of thinking about it,” Dacus told me. The realization soon washed over her that there could be repercussions, that she might have put her band in danger. “We had metal detectors at the shows, and it made me a little scared,” she admitted. That leg of the tour wound up raising $23,000, she estimated: “It made those shows feel extra purposeful.” (Dacus’s mother, who adopted Lucy as a baby and is adopted herself—life experiences that once shaped her pro-life leanings—told her daughter how proud she was to hear of the donations. “It felt really awesome to know that she had been changing all the time I had been changing,” Dacus said.) 

Before signing off from the Zoom, Dacus had one more word about memory—that, yes, she’s still journaling through these months. “I do try to include some of the things that feel quotidian, like, ‘I just finished my second COVID test of the week,” she said. (A couple hours later, she tweeted that a member of her tour family had tested positive, setting off a run of canceled shows, though she is back in the swing.) “I’ve tried to make note of how the crowds are all wearing masks, and I think it’s enabling people to sing louder,” she said. She wondered aloud whether it’s a factor of anonymity or if it’s more so a barrier that people have worked to overcome. 

Our connection faltered, with Dacus momentarily frozen in time. A snippet of an earlier conversation floated to mind. “Being in the present moment, I don’t really know what that means,” Dacus said in May, reflecting on the “emotional labor to-do list” she ticked through in the early pandemic, processing what she’d long put off. History had its comforts, at a safe remove. She and her friends do have a habit of asking each other questions that come across as a verbal pulse-taking: “Have you been feeling your life? Is it reaching your body?” she told me, describing the inert alternative—where pains and successes happen to you. But for Dacus, the here-and-now is a more layered proposition. “Sometimes when I feel my most present, I’m stepping out of the scene to say, ‘I’m going to remember this,’ or ‘In the future this will be meaningful.” The Dacus of five months ago paused and put it another way: “A past version of me would have never guessed that this is where I am.”

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• One Good Thing

One Good Thing: Lucy Dacus’s latest album is a different kind of ghost story

Home Video captures the tender beauty of queer teens.

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There’s a common trajectory that can frequently be observed in American popular music: A promising first album will brim with potential but maybe isn’t quite all there yet. A near-great second album will burst with ideas and can make it seem like the artist can do anything. A masterful, even perfect third album pulls together everything that worked in the first two albums to make something amazing.

I always think of this trajectory in terms of Bruce Springsteen. His first three albums — January 1973’s Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. ; November 1973’s The Wild, the Innocent, & the E-Street Shuffle ; and 1975’s Born to Run — follow this career trajectory almost exactly.

There are plenty of artists who follow this trajectory other than Springsteen, but allow me to stick with the Boss for a second, because another Springsteen superfan is 26-year-old singer-songwriter Lucy Dacus . And Dacus’s third album, Home Video , released this summer, is a straight-up masterpiece.

(I suspect Dacus will be flattered by the comparison. She released a terrific cover of Springsteen’s “Dancing in the Dark” in 2019, and she told Rolling Stone in an interview that year that “Bruce’s birthday should be a national holiday.”)

The similarities between Home Video and Born to Run aren’t readily apparent upon first listen. While Springsteen’s album is a blast of desperate rock, Dacus’s album builds lush musical arrangements full of shimmering percussion and ethereal backing vocals. It’s the kind of slightly stripped-down singer-songwriter arrangement that typified her first album, 2016’s No Burden . Born to Run , meanwhile, is brash, bold, and noisy, Springsteen’s street rat strivers straining to be heard over an enormous wall of sound.

Dacus isn’t averse to rocking out, either. No Burden contains plenty of tunes that turn up the volume a bit, and her 2018 second album, Historian , is louder still, tipping all the way over into heavier rock several times. That trend continues. Several songs on Home Video favor the sound of a shaggy bar band having the time of their life. The opening track, “Hot and Heavy,” offers a guitar-heavy tour of the white evangelical Southern milieu the album takes place in, while the single “Brando” is a terrific pissed-off breakup song just begging for either a hard rock or dance-pop cover.

But for much of its running time, Home Video skews ever so slightly more toward the quietude of Dacus’s debut album. Dacus has grown as a songwriter since 2016, and her songs create a tension where the people at the center of her stories are confronting horrifying things at a volume barely above a whisper. The album centerpiece “Thumbs” features the singer’s hushed accounting of a night when she accompanied a friend (or possibly lover) who was about to see her abusive father for the first time in years.

“Thumbs” is immediately followed with “Going Going Gone,” which amounts to a campfire sing-along about an innocent and nervous ex-boyfriend who grows out of that innocence and turns into a drunk who grabs women’s asses. And yet the song never leaves behind the feel of something you might sing around the fire in the middle of the woods. It’s gentle, even as its subject matter underscores a certain tragedy.

The voices on “Going Going Gone” include indie-rock enigma Mitski, whom Dacus opened for on Mitski’s most recent tour. The chorus also features Julien Baker and Phoebe Bridgers, whom Dacus records with as the trio boygenius. All three have made cameo appearances on one another’s most recent solo album, starting with Bridgers’s Punisher in 2020, continuing with Baker’s Little Oblivions this spring, and now concluding with “Going Going Gone” and “Please Stay” on Home Video . Dacus’s musical net is cast incredibly wide.

So why the Springsteen comparisons, beyond Dacus’s fandom for the rock star? For as ultimately different as Home Video and Born to Run sound, the two albums fall into similarly almost-autobiographical territory.

Springsteen’s stories of New Jersey working-class tough guys endlessly posturing in hopes no one will figure out what they’re overcompensating for had the feel of someone remembering their adolescence with just enough distance to make sense of it. (Springsteen was 25 when Born to Run came out.)

Meanwhile, Dacus draws from both her life and the lives of other people she knew growing up in heavily evangelical Virginia. She wrote many of the songs on the album after reading her childhood journals, and as such, her songs remember the pains of growing up queer in a place that didn’t always let people explore that side of themselves. (Dacus described herself as “gay,” “queer,” and “bisexual or pansexual” in the same sentence in a New York Times interview , and then said she thinks “Gender is a joke.”)

“Hot and Heavy” sets up the album as a kind of memory play — Dacus is back somewhere and suffused with painful memories of growing up. Where “Hot and Heavy” explicitly roots that in memories of a person Dacus misses, it also creates an expectation for the album to follow: You’re listening to the sonic equivalent of driving through your hometown after years away, memories pouring in with every building you pass.

Born to Run ends with the epic, mournful “Jungleland,” in which Springsteen’s strivers realize they might never escape. Home Video concludes with maybe the best song Dacus has yet written, “Triple Dog Dare,” which (in my read of the album) circles back to the person she missed so badly in “Hot and Heavy.”

“Triple Dog Dare” is directly autobiographical , drawing from a connection Dacus had with another girl as a teen that she didn’t realize was romantic attraction until the girl’s mother, seeing what was budding between the two, drove the teens apart. In real life, the friendship withered; in the song, Dacus and her friend run away on a boat, off to be together forever. Escape is possible, but only through storytelling and art. Home Video , like Born to Run before it, is haunted not by ghosts but by older versions of ourselves who made different choices from us, some for good and some for ill.

Our hardest memories never resolve into something we might have liked better, no matter how much we try. You’re always going to be haunted by the choices you didn’t make, the people who fell away from your life, and the places you ultimately had to leave. Home Video brims with the feeling of things that were lost and things that simply never were. It’s brilliant and beautiful and just about perfect.

Home Video is available on all music streaming platforms and for sale as a CD or digital download. For more recommendations from the world of culture, check out the One Good Thing archives.

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Can Lucy Dacus Ever Go Home Again?

After the success of her first two albums, Lucy Dacus moved away from the town where she grew up in search of a clean slate. But letting go of the past isn't easy.

In June of 2020, Lucy Dacus returned to her hometown of Richmond, Virginia for the first time since moving to Philadelphia. It had only been a few months, but she no longer recognized what she saw. In the wake of George Floyd’s murder, throngs of Richmond residents were protesting police violence in the streets and demanding that the city finally get rid of its Confederate monuments. The famous Robert E. Lee statue that anoints one end of Monument Avenue was covered in colorful protest art. A little further south, a group of protestors had torn down a statue of Christopher Columbus and thrown it in a nearby lake. When Dacus saw the empty pedestal where Columbus once stood, she burst into tears.

“I'm so glad they're coming down,” Dacus tells me in late May as we sit in the sunken backyard of a Brooklyn brownstone. “But I cried my entire trip because I wanted to be a part of that. I wanted to see it happen. And for knowing that even just [after] half a year away, I had changed so much and the city had changed so much.”

“That phrase, you can never go home again is true,” she says.

Dacus is in New York right now promoting her new album, Home Video , a nostalgic record that takes an unflinching look at her coming-of-age years in Richmond, and the overgrown yard we’re sitting in looks like it could be the setting of its own home video. There’s mismatched furniture and abandoned clay pots which are strewn across the pebbled portion of the yard where Dacus is sitting on one side of a chipped, dull gray table, her legs crossed laxly at her ankles.

“So where is home now?” I ask her. “I don't know, man!” she replies, bewildered and laughing a bit at the question. She has a tendency of laughing before launching into something complicated and uncertain. “Home might be a quest. Home might be in transit. It makes me feel sad because I want home too, but I don't know if anyone will ever get there.”

After 15 months of pixelated hangouts, where bad wifi often obscured the details of a person, Dacus cuts a lively presence. Her nails are painted bright blue and her crimson red lipstick pops against her pearly complexion. In conversation, she is smart and entertaining without being splashy. She wades into topics carefully, only after fully gauging the depth of a question. Once she has though, she is capable of talking in excited, unguarded riffs. Tonight, she is in a reflective mood and the warm weather and evening light encourage our breezy conversation. “I think I am kind of a reminiscent person,” Dacus tells me in between sips from her water bottle. “But there was definitely a change when I started doing music and touring a lot.”

In less than two years, Dacus released two critically acclaimed albums, 2016’s No Burden and 2018’s Historian . She also co-created a celebrated supergroup named boygenius with friends and fellow musicians Phoebe Bridgers and Julien Baker. The rapid ascent, Dacus says, threw her off, and her reminiscent tendencies only intensified as the quiet life she led before gave way to an unrecognizable new reality. She used to be an anonymous, joyful member of a thriving, local music scene, she tells me. Now strangers stop her on the sidewalk to wish her happy birthday. People she had never met acted like they knew her better than she knew herself. “You used to be so sweet,” she sings on Home Video ’s rollicking lead single “Hot & Heavy.” “Now you're a firecracker on a crowded street.”

As she continues to explain the jolting effect fame had on her, I get the sense that this grateful but reluctant rock star would’ve been just as happy drifting through life as a librarian. At least then she might’ve been able to stay put in her hometown of Richmond, VA. But as a popular indie artist in a small city, her profile got in the way of her privacy. Once people started showing up on her doorstep, Dacus knew it was time to pack her bags. “I finally got to the point where I felt unsafe enough in the familiar world of Richmond, that moving was a better option,” she says.

Plus, the version of home she knew and loved had been replaced by a more competitive and hostile scene. Dacus uncrosses her legs and recalls a heartbreaking memory when her friend sat her down and explained how the nurturing environment she’d grown up in was gone. “He was like, ‘Honestly, I love you. But once you started to get known, I think everybody wanted a taste of that, and the vibe is different. That [scene] doesn't exist anymore.’”

Dacus winces and attempts to reassure herself. “It was such a beautiful generative time and maybe it would have changed anyways…” The thought lingers in the air and the usually focused artist seems distracted. Her gaze fixates on the deck that stretches across the back of the brownstone behind me. “Sometimes I feel guilt that anyone who loves me would tell me not to feel.” Dacus exhales. “But that doesn't mean that I'm not feeling it!” She looks at me as if to say “ya know?” And I do. The obviousness of her admission makes us both laugh.

The sum total of all these things: the shape-shifting experience of sudden fame, the abrupt abandonment of a comfortable situation, and the guilt that comes from leaving something beloved behind, forced an urgent question to the front of Dacus’s mind: “Who have I been this whole time that I can cling to?”

Home Video is an attempt to answer that question. Written during her warp-speed rise to fame, the album’s songs reflect Dacus’s coming-of-age years in Richmond. There was the queer pining for a friend which she documents tenderly on “Triple Dog Dare,” and the duplicitous relationship with an older man who should’ve known better: “When you asked my age, I lied/I saw relief dawn on your eyes” she sings on “Partner in Crime.”

“At the time it felt playful and not serious,” Dacus says. “But over time, I've thought it was a really dark situation.” To channel the darkness and the deceit of the relationship, Dacus experimented with Auto-Tune—itself a mask—for the first time. The effect adds a watery texture to her vocals and an inflection of uncertainty to Dacus’s typically confident and sonorous alto voice.

Very few of the songs on Home Video feature the sprawling guitar sounds listeners have come to associate with Dacus. She purposefully designed these tracks to be warmer and more contained, as intimate as an early childhood memory and sometimes as gentle too. “Each song, I wanted it to feel kind of like its own world,” explains Dacus of the album’s design. “I wanted it to feel cohesive, but I wanted every song to feel different.”

On “Going Going Gone,” the supple strumming of an acoustic guitar submerges the listener in a story about a park bench make-out session. An isolated, piano-driven melody achieves a similar immersive effect on “Please Stay” — a quiet ballad about a relationship that’s just about out of gas. Meanwhile, the John Fahey-style fingerpicking that opens “Cartwheel” is a bright, but delicate presence that fades out and delightfully reappears like a roaming lightning bug, blinking its way across a summer lawn.

Many of these production choices led Dacus into new territory, or at least, back to places she hadn’t visited in a while. The use of piano in particular was a meaningful, if not surreal, departure from her typical style due to its connection to family. “My mom's a pianist so I had veered away from using piano because it had such a heavy connotation for me,” Dacus says before beginning to drift off. “But since this was going back to childhood anyways…”

When I ask Dacus if she thinks she had a good childhood, she pauses to consider the question. “It’s hard to say,” she responds after a while. “My first level impulse is yeah.” But there are multiple levels and the loquacious musician is just getting started. “My next level impulse is like, ‘actually was I just disassociating for a lot of it?’” She felt safe for the most part, sure, but she was also taught a lot of problematic things, but she felt cared for so ... I watch as Dacus yo-yos between decisions, debating only herself for a solid two minutes before ultimately resigning to not knowing. “I can keep going in a spiral like that,” she lets out with an exasperated laugh. (There’s that laugh again…) “It's hard to say good or bad.”

For all of her indecisiveness, one thing Dacus knows is that, upon reflection, the sex talk she got from her mom was pretty weird. For starters, it took place in the food court of a local mall. After a girl in a push-up bra and tiny shorts walked by their table, Dacus asked her Mom why she was dressed that way. “The summation of what she explained is that women who don't have self-respect appeal to men in order to find meaning in themselves. And men are dogs, and just are attracted to women that they want to have babies with.” Dacus latched onto that explanation, and as a result, was judgmental about the way women dressed for a long time. “Starting in high school, I started to shed that. But like probably elementary and middle school, that's kind of how it was. A lot of slut-shaming and internalized shame.”

It’s not easy to revisit your childhood. Some people never do it. But Dacus is reflective by nature and the vulnerability she exhibits on Home Video , the memories she shares about bad poetry and kisses warped by braces, let the rest of us off the hook. Through her stories and her specificity, we too revisit our pasts.

Take one listen to the song “VBS,” for example, and you’ll feel compelled to recall the last time you flung your awkward, adolescent body into a bunk bed. For Dacus, it was at the Christian summer camp program, Vacation Bible School, a staple experience of her childhood. “Some VBSs were really hateful. Some were basically just camp,” she says. “I went to so many. I think fondly about some of them but some of them were really messed up.” She laughs and launches into a story about a particularly fanatic VBS preacher. “He had us all get our iPods out and delete all the songs on them that weren't Christian music,” Dacus recalls. “But I fought for ‘Chasing Cars’ by Snow Patrol.”

On “Thumbs,” Dacus writes gracefully and without flinching about her friend’s no-good father and her own violent, protective instincts. “I would kill him/if you let me/I would kill him/quick and easy,” she sings over an echoey chamber of synthesizers. Through Dacus’s vulnerability, we experience the contradicting impulses—to harm and to heal—we all contain.

With the sun sinking beneath the city’s skyline, a chill now cuts through the warm spring air. Dacus and I huddle deeper into our respective jackets and talk about Home Video’ s impending release. Sweeping a strand of her thick, peppercorn black hair behind her ear, Dacus confesses that she’s nervous for her album to come out. “I'm worried about people following up with me from my personal life.”

She had given a few of her close friends who were the subject of songs a heads up, but she wonders if she’ll hear from the people in “Partner in Crime,” “Triple Dog Dare,” and a handful of other tracks. Dacus squeezes her shoulders up to her ears, as if bracing herself for an onslaught of iMessages from people from her past. “It’s gonna happen” she insists. And that’s why she considers Home Video her riskiest album. “It's like inviting something that will make my life more difficult,” Dacus says. By putting these songs out into the world, she’s letting the past back in through the front door. She is, in effect, going home again.

Abigail Covington is a journalist and cultural critic based in Brooklyn, New York but originally from North Carolina, whose work has appeared in Slate, The Nation , Oxford American , and Pitchfork

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Lucy Dacus brings ‘couch tour’ to Gateway City Arts

By Declan Langton ’22

Editor-in-Chief

Photo courtesy of Ali Meizels

Dressed in a jean jacket and bright red jumpsuit, singer-songwriter Lucy Dacus took to the Gateway City Arts stage on March 1 as a part of her spring “couch tour.” Rather than postpone the last portion of her North American tour due to two herniated discs, Dacus came up with a solution — bring a couch on stage and lay down while singing. 

At Gateway City Arts, Dacus continued the tour for her third album “Home Video” (2021). The show’s setup took place in front of a stream of home videos from Dacus’s own collection. On a screen behind the stage, clips played of her being held by her mother, performing in a school choir and showing off a scenic view in a rocky desert. Before the drums and mics were set up, two members of the stage crew carried out Dacus’s couch. As they placed it at the center of the stage, the crew was met by applause — and some chuckling — from members of the crowd. 

The room grew hot as the audience filed in during the opener, which featured addy, a musing folk rock band led by Adam Watkins, who, like Dacus, got their start in the Richmond, Virginia music scene. 

Laying on her couch bordered with a fake ivy vine, Dacus opened the show with “Triple Dog Dare,” the nearly eight minute album closer from “Home Video.” The song tells the dramatized story of a childhood friendship that borders on something more. “Triple Dog Dare” ends hauntingly, with the two girls running away together and later becoming missing “milk carton kids — ” their faces  plastered on the side of the beverage’s container. During this song, and the others she sang from the couch, Dacus’s voice seemingly emerged from nowhere. Her body was invisible to the majority of the crowd, blocked by those standing in the first few rows. Despite this, her sonic presence was dominating. 

Zoe Fieldman ’22, who attended the show, commented on this arrangement. 

“At first, I felt frustrated at not being able to see her. I had known she was injured, and expected the couch performance, but thought they would loft the sofa so that the audience might have a better view. This was not the case,” Fieldman explained. “However, I was incredibly impressed by their use of animation to supplement not being able to see the performer.”

Projected on the wall behind Dacus and her band were animations created specifically for each song. As she performed her song “Cartwheel” — about a childhood friend-turned-crush — the graphic featured children on a swing set, fireflies, a crescent moon and dark trees, mirroring the nostalgia of both the song and all of “Home Video.” 

“The animations were captivating and beautiful in addition to giving my eyes something to focus on without it distracting too much from the music itself. They also really captured the recurring themes of childhood, growing up,” Fieldman observed. 

At first, Dacus’s concealment seemingly caused a disconnect in the show. Two completely separate experiences were present in the room: one for those in the front row — nearly face to face with Dacus — and the rest of the room, who became reliant on the reactions of those sitting in the first row. 

Lucy James-Olson ’22, who attended the show alongside Fieldman, appreciated the setup, even if it was initially strange to adapt to. 

“It actually was kind of fun to not be able to see [Dacus] for the majority of the time — it encouraged me … to get immersed in the music and close my eyes and really listen, which was cool,” James-Olson said. 

Dacus’s lyrics are crafted, nostalgic storytelling, featuring vivid characters from friends to lovers to fathers. In her elegant voice, she flirts with inherent sadness and solitude, even when performing in front of a crowd humming and singing her words back toward the stage. 

Her song “Thumbs,” which Dacus released in two versions, is one of these songs built around characters. In the lyrics, Dacus tells the story of a dinner which she attends alongside her friend and her friend’s absent father. The twist: Dacus hates the father so violently that she spends a verse discussing how she would like to press her thumbs into his eyes “until they burst,” she sings. On March 1, she performed an alternate version of this song called “Thumbs Again” which came out a few months after the original version on “Home Video.” “Thumbs Again” replaces the droning synths of “Thumbs” with a pulsing, darker beat, adding layers to the frightening song, seemingly giving strength to the narrator. 

Despite limited visibility from the couch, Dacus continually addressed the members of the crowd she couldn’t see. “Hello, people I can’t see from my couch,” she said, the first time she sat up. Later, referencing the standing room only venue layout, she said, “I feel like I should stand more.” 

Stand more she did. Dacus’ March 1 performance was the first time she stood for three songs since injuring her back in early February. One of those songs was “Going Going Gone,” which she structured like a sing-along for the crowd. “Going gone, going going gone,” she sang along with members of the audience. 

Dacus’s setlist also featured well-known songs from her previous albums. From the 2016 album “No Burden,” Dacus delivered her song “I Don’t Wanna Be Funny Anymore.” 

“I wrote that when I was a teen,” Dacus told the crowd, smirking. 

From her second album, “Historian,” Dacus played “Yours & Mine” and “Addictions.” For “Addictions,” Dacus grabbed a guitar, playing it while continuing to lay on the couch — something you may expect to see in a living room kickback but was an exciting surprise at Gateway City Arts. 

“Yours & Mine” stunned Fieldman when Dacus performed it at the show. 

“I have not been able to stop listening to Yours & Mine since hearing it live. The performance was amazing and now it is one of my favorite songs,” Fieldman said.

“Night Shift,” the “Historian” opening track and one of Dacus’ most well-known songs, served as the show’s closer. The breakup ballad turned rock anthem is by far her most streamed song, amassing over 42 million streams on Spotify. 

With “Night Shift,” the energy at Gateway City Arts seemed to adjust. Members of the crowd moved closer to the stage and threw their hands into the air, dancing. Voices of those singing along started to become more clear, but Dacus’ powerful swell was never eclipsed as she led the room to the end of the night. 

Before leaving the stage, Dacus said, “This is a cool job, thank you for letting me have it.”

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Amazing show!

Lucy is amazing live and takes you to another world

Best Finale

Lucy and crew gave us a great performance! The staff were wonderful and so helpful! What a great night!! S Nelson

Lucy never disappoints. I’m a big fan of her and her music and I’m glad that I was able to get my hands on some tickets. The acoustics at the Wiltern were great and Lucy’s vocals were better, as expected. The vibe during the concert was simply immaculate. I highly recommend the Wiltern and seeing Lucy live.

best concert i’ve ever been

Lucy was absolutely amazing. Her voice and her presence are so powerful and beautiful. Her band crew were also incredible, there were pretty interactive and expressive with Lucy and us. You could tell how much they were enjoying their art and the show. Lucy was awesome, everyone ended up shouting her name at the end of the show for her to come back and she did!! <3

absolutely amazing show

Lucy put on an absolutely amazing show. I highly recommend anyone thinking about getting tickets to do it

one of the best nights of my life

lucy dacus was one of the most beautiful and therapeutic concerts i have ever been to!! i had so much fun i highly recommend!!

She was so amazing kind and funny. The visuals and lights were everything. Her band was super cool and HER VOICE TOO. Ugh it gave me so much joy i will never forget it. If you are questioning if it is worth it to see Lucy, the answer is always yes.

Lucy Dacus was so amazing her voice was even better in person and she told little jokes that i loved

Fantastic Concert!

Parking was easy, getting into the venue was simple and it was a great room to hear a touring band with killer sound production. Lucy Dacus had a wonderful turnout and put on a stellar show. So much fun!

I love lucy

The whole show sounded and looked amazing!!! I will definitely be checking out more shows at the Charleston music hall especially if they attract more acts like Lucy Dacus and her companions!!!

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The head and the heart, the avett brothers, the japanese house, gus dapperton, two door cinema club, indigo de souza.

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Lucy Dacus is a multiple award nominated singer-songwriter who has exploded onto the scene in 2015. Since then, she has released three successful albums and has received critical acclaim by fans and critics. Her work is celebrated by music lovers around the world and her tracks are becoming more popular on streaming media every day. But nothing is as exciting as catching this stunning performer live. And fans are lining up to book their tickets.

But you can skip the line via this website and grab the best seats in the house while supplies last. We make it easy to keep track of upcoming Lucy Dacus concert tours and live appearances so you can order tickets with only a few clicks. We even have some exciting info on the history of this performer.

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Lucy and her band were fantastic! Despite having a cold she created a nice sense of intimacy with the croud, and songs like 'Night Shift' and 'I don't wanna be funny anymore' were great in a live setting. She even played a song that she had wrote earlier in the day as the closer, despite being a little hesitant. She seemed to be comfortable performing it in the setting though. Overall, I would recommend the show and I think I would go again!

The whole show was so visceral and real. Lucy was beautiful and candid with us. And Mothers was mesmerizing--I noticed no one in the crowd was filming them on their phones but everyone was just entranced. It was a magical show, altogether and an honor to see them play. <3

Wow. What an experience. Her melodic voice and engrossing phrasing capture the audience. Not to mention the rawness of her lyrics. She truly takes you through a personal journey. Everything was nothing short of amazing in concert.

This was such a great concert! Second time getting to see Lucy Dacus and was not disappointed. Her vocals are amazing and lyrics are witty and real. She gave the crowd all her love and was very thankful and humble.

She kicks ass!! Brings vulnerability and honesty to the table and has an intimate stage presence that makes the show really unique and enjoyable. Shes always got a bit of witty commentary too. Really fun show.

Fun concert! Excited to see how Lucy and her band will grow and perfect their sound. Performed a new tune and played for about an hour. Great show along with Julien Baker who came on after.

Amazing performance in Amsterdam, the audience is great, and she is very interactive with her fans, it's all very heartwarming. Her voice is worth going to a live concert for real.

Her voice sounds like it's coming right off a record player. It's raw and draws you in, and she has the intellectual and emotional lyrics to accompany it. She's amazing.

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Watch Boygenius Rock SNL with "Not Strong Enough" and "Satanist"

Phoebe Bridgers, Lucy Dacus, and Julien Baker played two songs from boygenius's Grammy-nominated album, the record, in Studio 8H on the November 11 episode hosted by Timothée Chalamet.

Fresh off a fall tour promoting their 2023 full-length album, the record, indie singer-songwriter supergroup boygenius were  Saturday Night Live 's November 11 musical guest . Between sketches starring Host Timothée Chalamet, the trio delivered two guitar-driven songs from  the record. In a treat for fans of the band, members Phoebe Bridgers, Lucy Dacus, and Julien Baker also appeared in a sketch alongside cast members Bowen Yang and Sarah Sherman. 

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It was the first  SNL  appearance for members Dacus and Baker, both solo artists in their own right, and bandmate Bridgers' second after performing as musical guest during Dan Levy's Season 46 episode. (Coincidentally, Dave Grohl, frontman for October 28 musical guest Foo Fighters , backed boygenius on drums during "Satanist" in their October 31 Hollywood Bowl show.)

It was also boygenius's first TV performance since they received six 2024 Grammy nominations , including Album of the Year for  the record  and Record of the Year, Best Rock Performance, and Best Rock Song for "Not Strong Enough."

Watch boygenius perform "Not Strong Enough" and "Satanist" on the November 11 episode of SNL  below, and scroll down to see the sketch in which the three donned wigs to play Troye Sivans (or is it "Troyes Sivan"?).

Watch boygenius perform "Not Strong Enough"

Backed by their energetic band (note the amazing Beatles-font boygenius logo on the drumset), Bridgers, Baker, and Dacus alternated vocals and shared harmonies against crashing drums and the trio's guitars on their Grammy-nominated single. 

Watch boygenius play "Satanist"

For their second  SNL  performance, boygenius delivered another high-energy song from  the record , "Satanist." The song displayed the members' skills on vocals as the track's tempo went from rollicking to slowed and back again in a dramatic red light. As the three rocked out on guitar, it was slightly evocative of a moment when Bridgers smashed a guitar at the end of her 2021  SNL  performance—but Julien Baker simply heaved hers at the song's conclusion.  

Troye Sivan reacts to boygenius playing Troye Sivans in the "Sleep Demon" sketch

In this sketch starring Host Timothée Chalamet, Bowen Yang, and Sarah Sherman, Bridgers, Dacus, and Baker played three sleep demons in the form of Australian pop star and actor Troye Sivan, who perform a strange dance and flash their red undies. It makes more sense in the sketch..kind of.

Troye Sivan himself shared the sketch to Instagram on November 12, captioning his post, "WHY IS LIFE SO WEIRDDDDD RN LMAO IM DEAD" and tagging Yang and Chalamet.

View this post on Instagram A post shared by troye sivan (@troyesivan)

Originally published Nov 12, 2023.

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Troye Sivan Says Watching Timothée Chalamet Play Him on 'SNL' Feels Like a 'Weird F---ing Dream'

Timothée Chalamet starred in a sketch on 'Saturday Night Live' that pulled from Troye Sivan's "Got Me Started" music video

Don’t even get Troye Sivan started on his excitement over one of Timothée Chalamet ’s recent Saturday Night Live sketches.

The Oscar-nominated actor, 27, hosted SNL for a second time on Saturday — and in one skit, played a sleep demon version of Sivan, wearing the same clothes and busting the same moves that the Australian singer does in his recent “Got Me Started” music video.

The day after the sketch aired, Sivan expressed his shock on social media, saying in a TikTok video that he was in disbelief.

“The only way that I can describe this is it’s like a weird f—--g dream,” he said. “Like imagine… I’m like, no, Timothée Chalamet was in my dream, but he was mem, and he was wearing my clothes and he was doing…”

Sivan, 28, also shared a clip of the sketch to Instagram with the caption, “WHY IS LIFE SO WEIRDDDDD RN LMAO IM DEAD.“

Bowen Yang , who played a doctor in the skit, responded in the comments section with, “🎶 god i wish it was you 🎶,” a lyric from Sivan’s song “What’s the Time Where You Are?”

The sketch was titled “Troye Sivan Sleep Demon” and featured a woman (played by Sarah Sherman) in a sleep clinic experiencing sleep paralysis. As she tried to explain the mysterious figures she’d been seeing in her sleep to a doctor (played by Yang), Chalamet appeared as Sivan.

The Dune actor rocked the same blue pants, white cutout tank top and red underwear that Sivan does in his music video — and gave the music video choreography a whirl, too.

Noam Galai/Getty 

When asked by the woman if he was a demon, Chalamet replied, “No. Not quite, girlie. I’m an Australian YouTube twink-turned-indie pop star. And model-turned-HBO actor Troye Sivan being played by an American actor who can’t do an Australian accent. Bye, diva.”

Yang then explained to her that they’d been seeing the so-called Sivan sleep demon in more and more patients and warned that if she invited them into her dreams, they’d begin to multiply. Before long, Phoebe Bridgers, Lucy Dacus and Julien Baker of the band boygenius (the musical guest of the night) appeared in the same outfits, eventually doing the same dance and also dropping their pants to show off their red undies — as Sivan does in his video.

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Sivan released the music video for “Got Me Started” in September, and his third album, Something to Give Each Other , came out in October.

He received his first Grammy nominations on Friday, earning nods for best pop dance recording and best music video for his song “Rush.”

“I can’t even think- My first GRAMMY nomination…and second. A life long dream, no joke,” Sivan wrote on Instagram. “THANK YOU ALL SO MUCH FOR EVERYTHING thank you @recordingacademy.”

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Boygenius Members Respond to the Group’s Six Grammy Nominations: ‘It’s Triple the Joy’

The celebration will extend to the trio's 'SNL' appearance this weekend.

By Chris Willman

Chris Willman

Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic

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The three members of Boygenius are not having to stretch to figure out a time and a place to celebrate the six Grammy nominations that came in for the band Friday morning. They’re booked for “ Saturday Night Live ” this weekend — and, live from New York, they shared their thoughts via Zoom about the big love that has come their way from the Recording Academy, even as they rehearse for a key TV appearance.

“I don’t know how to respond to it,” says Julien Baker . “It’s just happened. I’m overwhelmed”… but “stoked,” she finally affirms.

“It’s triple the joy, right?” Bridgers asks aloud. “Yeah, much easier to feel happy for them. Much easier to feel , kind of,” she adds.

Bridgers can elaborate on that, looking back to the Grammys’ 2020-21 election cycle: “It was fucking COVID when I was nominated, and this is so much more celebratory. I was pretty traumatized last time, and the only way I felt it was on the phone. So it’s already way more fun, to find out in a room full of people and be celebrating.

“We play ‘SNL’ tomorrow, which I’m kind of nervous about. So it’s like, talk to us after the show,” Bridgers continues. “If it went fine, we’re happy.” Not that there could be a more affirmative moment. “It’s definitely like, ‘Yeah, ‘Oh, people like our band. We should go play and rock the way that people like. Yeah — ‘Do that thing people like.’ ‘Thank you! We will.'”

Did the “SNL” talent team show amazing foresight in signing the group up for the episode coming the day after Grammy nominations, knowing it’d feel like a “ripped from today’s headlines” booking? “I think they booked us because they think we’re great,” Dacus responds, dryly. (Good answer.)

Although they do wonder aloud about possible themes to the booking. “We filmed those promos yesterday with Timothée Chalamet,” Bridgers says, “and he was like, ‘I feel like the fourth Boygenius member,’ which is like… I feel like that’s a bisexual joke — like, that he would be in Boygenius?”

In any case, it might not be smart to place any bets on anything as repetitive as, like, the members collectively smashing their guitars, in an echo of Bridgers’ famous 2021 solo performance on the show. “Hey, I tried ,” she points out, alluding to the guitar’s own fighting spirit that night.

Boygenius is up for Grammys in six categories: album of the year and best alternative album, for “The Record”; record of the year, best rock performance and best rock song, for “Not Strong Enough”; and best alternative performance, for the ballad “Cool About It.” The “Record” album itself has a seventh nomination, for best engineered album. And Bridgers has a seventh nomination for her featured appearance on SZA’s “Ghost in the Machine,” in the pop duo/group performance category.

The Grammys will be telecast by CBS from L.A.’s Crypto.com Arena on Feb. 4. To read the full list of 2024 nominations, click here .

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• June 8, 2022 Setlist

Lucy Dacus Setlist at Forum Theatre, Melbourne, Australia

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• First Time Play Video
• Addictions Play Video
• Hot & Heavy Play Video
• Christine Play Video
• VBS Play Video
• Cartwheel Play Video
• Yours & Mine Play Video
• Timefighter Play Video
• Partner in Crime Play Video
• Brando Play Video
• Fool's Gold Play Video
• Thumbs Play Video
• Going Going Gone ( With Alex Lahey, Julia Jacklin, Sarah Thompson, Gordi and Jennifer Aslett ) Play Video
• I Don't Wanna Be Funny Anymore Play Video
• Kissing Lessons Play Video
• Dancing in the Dark ( Bruce Springsteen  cover) Play Video
• Night Shift Play Video
• Triple Dog Dare Play Video
• Bus Play Video

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5 activities (last edit by conditionnm , 8 Jul 2022, 18:02 Etc/UTC )

Songs on Albums

• Going Going Gone
• Hot & Heavy
• Partner in Crime
• Triple Dog Dare
• Night Shift
• Timefighter
• Yours & Mine
• Kissing Lessons
• Fool's Gold
• I Don't Wanna Be Funny Anymore
• Dancing in the Dark by Bruce Springsteen

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• Lucy Dacus Meow, Wellington - Jun 5, 2022 Jun 05 2022
• Lucy Dacus Meow, Wellington - Jun 6, 2022 Jun 06 2022

Jun 8, 2022

• Lucy Dacus RISING 2022 - Jun 8, 2022 Jun 08 2022

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• Lucy Dacus The Metro Theatre, Sydney - Jun 10, 2022 Jun 10 2022
• Lucy Dacus Forest Hills Stadium, Queens, NY - Jun 16, 2022 Jun 16 2022

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