The gentler Lucy Dacus’ songs seem, the more piercing they usually are. The singer-songwriter’s sparest compositions tend to be not only the most emotionally unsparing, but points of unexpected climax in her records, with ‘Thumbs’ off 2021’s Home Video remaining the most terrific example. Since that album was released, Dacus has won three Grammys with her boygenius bandmates Phoebe Bridgers and Julien Baker (for the record), who both feature on Forever Is a Feeling, Dacus’ Blake Mills-produced fourth album and major label debut. Rather than expanding or polishing up her sound, it charts an ongoing evolution by refining the subtleties and zoning into the minutiae of her songwriting, whose reflections of love, fame, and trust now concern some of the very people helping to bring it to life. Save for ‘Limerence’, the album’s advance singles have mostly been bouncy and mid-tempo, but there’s an enticing tug-of-war between those songs and the deep cuts that pull back. Forever is about traveling long distances and trying to transcend them, about tasting forever in the throes of change, taking the gamble on love when you’re caught between fantasy and truth. It doesn’t always sound as big as the concepts Dacus invokes – God, Fate, Chance – but it’s in the stillest moments that you know exactly what she means, leaving you in a chokehold.
1. Calliope Prelude
The name, in Greek, literally means “beautiful-voiced,” a quality that rendered her the Muse of eloquence and epic poetry. Dacus’ musical trajectory may have been marked by a shift towards elegance, but the singer-songwriter has never presented herself as a natural embodiment of it, but something strainful and aspirational: “Believe me, I’m speaking plainly and painfully/ Trying to stay elegant, eloquent and delicate to you,” she sang on Historian’s ‘Body to Flame’. Her own voice and poetry does not yet make an appearance; the opening track is an instrumental showcase for one of the album’s principal collaborators, Phoenix Rousiamanis. “If most people’s minds have one to ten facets, hers has like a hundred,” Dacus said in press materials. You can hear them all in the stacked layers of violin, beautifully stirring the record to life.
2. Big Deal
Over shuffling drums and softly strummed guitar, Dacus makes her way to the titular point, “You’re a big deal,” which she repeats over and over. A New Yorker profile that confirmed Dacus is in a committed relationship with Julien Baker framed Forever Is a Feeling as an album about falling in love, but Dacus was also inspired by the other end of that. Yet a song as nuanced and gracious as ‘Big Deal’ blurs the line between the falling in and out, though it chronologically fits into the latter. “Everything comes up to the surface in the end/ Even the things we’d rather leave unspoken,” she sings, and that affirmation is the thing she lands on, even if a relationship between them could never flourish. Beneath the song’s own surface is a lush tapestry of sound ensuring none of the genuine emotion is misconstrued as irony – not even “sincerely happy for the both of you,” which in any other context should leave at least a small burn.
3. Ankles
I wrote about the song’s lyrics in our list of the best songs of January; what I’d like to point your attention to here is Dacus’ use of the Solina and Juno synths, which sparkle gorgeously over the violin and cello. As Dacus sings “Let me touch you where I want to,” each repetition of “there” seems to fill the ceiling with paint. The dreamy instruments soon all fall into the same rhythm, like two bodies falling into place, or fantasy taking real shape.
4. Limerence
Every layer of artifice – and most eloquent instrumentation – melts on ‘Limerence’, the record’s first real gut-punch. The piano (played by Rousiamanisis) is one with Dacus’ stream-of-consciousness; every other musical element dizzies with uncertainty, desire, guilt. Even poetry, in its vaguest definition, seems out of the question: “Everything comes up to the surface in the end/ Even the things we’d rather leave unspoken” becomes “I’m just shoveling popcorn into my mouth/ So I don’t say the things that I’m thinking out loud.” Then, of course, it all starts to spill out: wanting to break someone’s heart; dissociation; betrayals of trust. It’s all sung in such plain language that when Dacus ends the song with “the stillness might eat me alive,” it hardly sounds figurative.
5. Modigliani
“Modigliani melancholy got me long in the face,” sings Dacus on this track co-produced by Blake Mills, who also helmed the just-released and similarly baroque record by Japanese Breakfast titled For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women). Nice! The song, which also features the record’s first Phoebe Bridgers guest vocal, feels a bit aimless until Dacus makes her point clear – “You will never be famous to me” – an interesting echo of “You’re a big deal.” Celebrity has put a barrier between the singer and the other person, making her homesick for places she’s never been to. She’s still trying to find the words, which explains why ‘Modigliani’ feels more like a draft than a complete thought.
6. Talk
The record’s most dynamic and arguably damning song, ‘Talk’ mounts up tension as Dacus’ questioning escalates from “Why can’t we talk anymore?” to “Why was our best sex in hotels and our worst fights in their stairwells?” By that point, you can barely hear her voice over the avalanche of instrumentation, which includes “horror strings” by Jake Finch and “horror piano” by Collin Pastore. It may not be enough to make you flinch, but it definitely shakes up the record.
7. For Keeps
‘For Keeps’ is Dacus’ confessional songwriting at its most exacting and fully realized – it doesn’t even need the violin provided in ‘Limerence’, or Blake Mills’ illustrious production, just the accompaniment of his acoustic guitar. “If the Devil’s in the details, then God is in the gap in your teeth/ You are doing the Lord’s work every time you smile at me,” Dacus exalts. You’re waiting for the twist, the but, the reason for the song’s title. They come in order: “But I still miss you when I’m with you/ Cause I know we’re not playing for keeps.” Like sighing with a knot in your throat, a breath so sharp it threatens to eat you back alive.
8. Forever Is a Feeling
The personnel on the title track is exciting: Baker and Bridgers both lend vocals, Madison Cunningham is on 12-string acoustic guitar, Hannah Kim plays harp, Ted Poor contributes gamelan, Melina Duterte and Andrew Lappin offer intricate drum programming, and there’s additional drums, synths, and piano from Bartees Strange. But the song never really explodes like you expect it to, perhaps because forever isn’t this infinite, ever-expanding feeling in Dacus’ universe so much as a liminal one: being “in between things that make sense,” as she puts it on the previous song. Bliss makes sense, and Hell does too. Try to remember both and you get something like forever.
9. Come Out
Forever Is a Feeling was written between the fall of 2022 and summer 2024, and the way Dacus wraps a melody around the line “I miss you, I miss you, I miss you in my arms” makes me wonder if ‘Come Out’ was written after Dacus attended Mitski’s acoustic show in Los Angeles last year. (Mitski sang backing vocals on Home Video’s ‘Going Going Gone’.) A gentler counterpart to ‘Modigliani’, the song’s longing is enhanced by ethereal layers of harp, celeste, and toy piano, while the drums echo out as if to travel the whole distance. But it’s the third verse, where Dacus takes a step back, that’s the real standout. “I used to think that’d be the worst, to grow old and run out of words/ Now I have seen some incredible things/ I could never describe if I tried.” Not talking, or having nothing to say, could feel like that, too.
10. Best Guess
Speaking of what the future could feel like, we have ‘Best Guess’. As in, “You are my best guess at the future.” As in, the most uncomplicated and purely happy song on Forever Is a Feeling. There’s no doubt lyrically that Dacus is taking the bet, but there’s a sense of holding back in the music – you wonder why it’s not fully going for it.
11. Bullseye
Hozier reanimates the song when he appears in the second verse, but it’s the way his voice lifts the song that’s most transfixing. It looks back on a broken relationship with a mix of earnest nostalgia and spite, worth it for the final couplet alone: “The world that we built meant the world to me/ When one world ends, the other worlds keep spinning.”
12. Most Wanted Man
Few guitarists can play the electric or make it sound like Blake Mills does here – the sort of tangled, piercing thunder we’ve come to associate with his work on Perfume Genius’ music, which includes Glory, the album that’ll come out the same day as Forever Is a Feeling. The instrument is thrillingly synchronized with Dacus’ atypical delivery, which bolts through each confession as if it might shield the intimacy away from the listeners who don’t need a footnote to understand who “the most wanted man in West Tennessee” is. (Dacus doubles down by inviting Baker to sing on the track.) Blink and you might miss ardent promises like “I just wanna make you happy/ Will you let me spend a lifetime trying?” and “I promise anything you give to me is something I will keep.” But Dacus really makes a run for it when she sings: “If it’s not God, it’s Fate/ If it’s not Fate, it’s Chance/ If it’s my chance I’m gonna take it.” None of the hesitation of ‘Best Guess’ here.
13. Lost Time
‘Lost Time’ is to ‘Most Wanted Man’ what ‘Limerence’ is to ‘Ankles’, or maybe what ‘Come Out’ is to ‘Modigliani’ – an exhalation, simpler and gentler. But it’s also that to the entire album, and it pays off in a cathartic climax that holds enough of that ‘Night Shift’ spark to excite those who may have lost faith in Lucy Dacus ever making anything like that song – even if it’s only reserved for those who have stuck through the most patient, understated stretches of Forever Is a Feeling. “I notice everything about you,” she proclaims. “I can’t help it/ It’s not a choice, it’s been this way since we met.” When she reverse-engineers the track to close with the demo version, it works like a time machine, undiluted evidence of this way. If you’ve made it this far, you can’t help but be swept up by the feeling, the one you can never quite put a finger on.
