Forever Is A Feeling is a “Big Deal”
Album Review: Lucy Dacus’ ‘Forever Is a Feeling’
Review: Lucy Dacus’ fourth record is a beautiful queer time capsule about falling in love.
It’s rare for an album to knock you off your axis in a way that feels permanent. Most albums have a lull, a questionable lyric, or a production choice that takes the listener out of the experience. For me, a perfect album is one I can’t wait to buy on vinyl (if I ever get a record player) so I can hear it in its proper form. Lucy Dacus’s fourth record, Forever Is A Feeling, is one of those select few.
As a follow-up to her third album, Home Video, this album feels like a full-scale coming out, especially after Dacus revealed in a New Yorker profile that she is dating her bandmate Julien Baker. Where Home Video retreaded Dacus’s childhood in Richmond, Virginia, revisiting unrequited crushes and questioning her sexuality as a Christian, Forever Is A Feeling discusses “playing with your scissors,” a double entendre referring to the three fates in Greek mythology and lesbian sex. It is an unabashedly queer album, coming as a breath of fresh air as LGBTQ+ rights continue under attack in the United States.
Forever Is A Feeling is a love story. And like any good love story, there are tropes: friends-to-lovers, right person wrong time, slow burn romance. Our lovers begin the album confessing they have feelings for one another on “Big Deal,” underscored by gentle acoustic guitar and drums. “You’ve got your girl, you’re gonna marry her / And I’ll be watching in a pinstriped suit / Sincerely happy for the both of you,” sings Dacus, knowing that her long-time crush will never be brought to fruition. This flows into “Ankles,” a sexy pop-rock song where Dacus imagines acting out her feelings. And from there, Dacus gracefully tells us the story.
As a lyricist, Dacus is a tour de force; her words make you want to print out the lyrics so you can annotate them and inspect every last word. As with the earlier referenced lyric about scissors, clever lyrics are littered across the album. The bridge of “Best Guess” is one example of this, with Dacus singing, “Here is the church / Here is the steeple / You were looking for saints / But you only found people,” referring to a certain loss of faith. A simple twist on a nursery rhyme becomes a way to confess that her lover need not be an angel for Dacus to claim her.
Though the main plot of the record is falling in love, the B story recounts a breakup. As the foundation of one relationship is formed, other ties must be broken. On “Talk,” Dacus describes the beginning of the end of a relationship. The song almost feels haunted by what’s gone unsaid, ghostly echoes and “oohs” filling the soundscape. Beyond that, it’s about the expectation of sex in a relationship that already feels over. “Talk” shows off Dacus’s easy mix of conversational, confessional, and poetic ability in her lyrics, with lines calling her ex’s body “a spectre / Hungry as a scythe,” then asking, “Why was our best sex in hotels?”
Back in the A story, it is pretty obvious that Julien Baker is the subject of this record. There is a sprinkling of clear references to Baker throughout early tracks, referring to the love interest as Dacus’s “best friend” and saying, “I remember thinking you were pretty when we met,” a detail later revealed in a Rolling Stone profile of boygenius. If it wasn’t clear that Baker was the love interest before, the final two tracks on the record, “Most Wanted Man” and “Lost Time,” make it certain. For one thing, Baker performs backup vocals on “Most Wanted Man,” but Dacus also refers to catching “the most wanted man in West Tennessee.” Who else could it be about other than Tennessee-born Baker?
While the album is a love story, “Lost Time” truly shines. The song is an almost five-minute-long “I love you” to Baker because “every day that I knew and didn’t say is lost time.” The lyrics of “Lost Time” are simple and not complex to understand. But every little detail in the bridge builds the love that Baker and Dacus have concealed from the world until now. “I notice everything about you,” Dacus says after describing laying out Baker’s clothes, jewelry and 60-day chip. Their love for one another hits you like a ton of bricks on this song, and in all honesty, I’ve yet to listen to it without crying. It truly feels like Baker and Dacus are living between the pages of a paperback in the romance section.
This record may require some knowledge of its subjects before listening, but it is enjoyable nonetheless. Forever Is A Feeling proves that the three-time Grammy winner doesn’t need to write with her bandmates to make excellent music, but she does need their influence. May we all be so lucky to find the Julien Baker to our Lucy Dacus.