Instead, she’s recounting old memories with no filter and turning them into songs, an attempt “to make order out of something… assert control over my perception of myself.” In that regard, Home Video is a smashing success: It puts Dacus’s teenage and early-twenties experiences on the page more clearly than anything she’s done before.
There’s an actual name and face behind it.” By contrast, on her 2016 debut No Burden and 2018 sophomore LP Historian, she “was making an effort…to write things that were really general.” Those albums earned her a reputation as a leading voice in a new generation of lyrically deft rock musicians — in 2018, the New York Times called her a “star.” The praise dovetailed with an onslaught of touring, first behind Historian and then around her ceaselessly buzzed-about EP with Boygenius, her trio with contemporaries and dear friends Julien Baker and Phoebe Bridgers.
“Touring a lot and being away from Richmond really shook my identity,” Dacus says, “because I found a lot of myself in my hometown and being involved in the music community there.
“I felt like it gave me more access to myself, and I realized I had all these rules about what I could and couldn’t some heavier topics than before,” her music has never sounded lighter and freer.
Home Video often sounds like a close friend unburdening herself of a formative teenage or early college memory in full detail.
It’s close to impossible to describe Home Video without naming things Dacus has actually experienced, and that’s exactly the point.
I might be writing a song about a bad relationship…or a friend in high school that I have complex feelings about, but it’s still stuff I want to remember, and stuff that I will remember because I learned from it.
“You called me cerebral,” she recalls before asking with a healthy dose of humor, “Would it have killed you to call me pretty instead?” The chorus hinges on the declaration that “you never knew me like you thought you did,” as though Dacus — at least for now — does know herself.
Two tracks later, as Dacus sings “I’m not tired yet / We still got a lot to figure out” at the outset of closer “Triple Dog Dare,” she seems to acknowledge that this whole self-reckoning thing is an endless cycle.