She doesn’t like being prescriptive; she just thinks it’s easier to help solve other people’s problems. “Sometimes I wonder if I just come off as a really wise person, or am I actually wise?” she laughs.
It’s that outlook — sweetly compassionate, astute without being self-serious — that characterizes Home Video, Dacus’ marvelous third album.
Through it all, Dacus dispenses wistful wisdom in a low, contained voice — the kind you’d want to hear from your best friend on the phone after your first great love tells you he’s moving on.
“I believe that it’s the right thing to do.” She paints herself in that role frequently across Home Video: On “Christine,” she warns a friend about sticking with an inadequate romantic partner; on “Cartwheel,” she describes sneaking out at night to offer silent consolation.
When “Thumbs” was first released, she admitted in a press release that writing it made her feel “weird, almost sick,” and that her early attempts to play it made her feel “shaky,” but her bandmates in the trio boygenius encouraged her to perform it on tour with them.
Unlike much of Home Video, “Thumbs” is spare — Dacus’ voice over synthesizer chords — and her delivery is so sweet that when she cooly swerves from patiently sitting by her friend’s side to admitting her murderous fantasies about the man they’re meeting the effect is shocking.
Some of this compassion, Dacus says, was there in the moment — she says she certainly felt it on the day about which she wrote “Thumbs” — but some of it took a little more time.
Stevenson’s songs don’t always follow traditional rock structures — she’d skip a chorus or a bridge if she didn’t need it — and you can hear the room in her recordings.
Stevenson is a fan of Dacus now too; she says the younger songwriter’s strong narrative instincts and eye for detail are especially present on Home Video.
The attention landed Dacus national tours and offers from around 20 different labels ; her sophomore record, 2016’s Historian, and its enormously cathartic lead single “Night Shift,” earned Dacus a reputation as one of the brightest rising stars in indie rock.
The three have collaborated on each other’s solo albums ever since — Dacus and Baker sing on Bridgers’ sophomore album, Punisher; Dacus and Bridgers sing on Baker’s album from earlier this year.
She figured it was “an album’s worth of memories.” The album was slated for release in 2020 before the pandemic put everything on hold.
In an album about what is often the most embarrassing, viscerally awful and emotionally turbulent period of one’s life — which is to say, being a teenager — Dacus extends compassion to both herself and those around her.
Fiction, Dacus says, wasn’t the point of this record — in fact, the closing verses to “Triple Dog Dare” are the only moments on Home Video that she didn’t write directly from experience.
While the song imagines an alternate timeline, Dacus isn’t in the habit of getting caught up in what might have been.
I posit that a third record is a pretty sensible time for an artist to stop and take stock of where she has come from, and Dacus agrees.
2020, she says, was supposed to be a relatively slow year and she planned — before the pandemic intervened — on splitting her time between her new city and her hometown.
Dacus chalks the move up to her friends’ collective vision rather than her own wisdom: “I think we all just had been alone for a couple of months,” she says, “and it became very clear what was important.” It’s not every friend whose dream can persuade you to move across the country and sign a lease.