Is That A Hearse Or A Limousine?

It’s nine years to the day since the release of Lucy Dacus’ debut album No Burden. In celebration I’d like to discuss my favorite of her songs. Her time with the band boygenius has been rightfully lauded and perhaps now too picked-over, so I’m eager to return to her early work, and invite those of you who haven’t dabbled to take the trip with me.

Lucy Dacus is a bard of dislocation.

Each of her first three albums seem in search of one’s place within their own personal history. Things happen to Dacus’ narrators, and they do not make sense in hindsight, even if they felt true in the moment. One cannot feel it for the first time a second time. In five years these songs will feel like covers, dedicated to new lovers. Though the “why?” cries out at the heart of her watercolor ballads, many songs are uncertain entirely of the actual action. There are these laser bright details and moments that should, in theory, elucidate every aspect of the emotional moment, but maddeningly do not. In the liner notes for Home Video, Dacus writes an acknowledgment to someone named Jenny, “I’m still confused about everything that went down.”

In her debut album, No Burden, the past is animate, intimate, and terrifying. Famously recorded in a single day with a band that barely knew their parts, No Burden is a glittering blueprint of Dacus’ narrative style and structure to come, from the careening centerpiece, “Map On A Wall” to the kaleidoscopic lament and reprise of “Dream State…” to closer “…Familiar Place”. It is a slingshot montage coming-of-age over and over again odyssey. One gets the sense Dacus and her narrators are exhausted by the karmic loop they find themselves repeating. It doesn’t matter the time or distance, one falls in love and loses again, one pares the parts of themselves that stick out in every new room. There is always another bruise to poke in the morning, and it looks like someone you once knew.

Another gratitude in Home Video’s liner notes: “Thanks to all my friends who taught me lessons I didn’t want to learn, for changing me whether they witnessed it or not.”

Central to this vision of the reanimated bildungsroman is track 2, “Troublemaker Doppelganger”, which on first hearing I played back twice more. It remains my favorite of her songs, something I suspect she might be embarrassed or disappointed to hear. An early work, possibly imperfect, maybe unkind to a real person’s memory, perhaps an oversimplification. I can’t get enough.

Dacus drags a vocal-fried drawl over the opening verse, reminding the uninitiated that even if her speaking voice seldom betrays this biographical note, Virginia is indeed the American South. See how much the drums manage to hold tension in No Burden even while sticking to the toms. Only a couple of the songs feature the hi-hat, so familiar it usually becomes wallpaper. The drummer’s focus on low tones crank the contrast between the rhythm and Dacus’ often high-range vocals. It’s in this intro where the drums and her voice are evenly matched. The whole effect builds that high summer dread so integral to our conception of the Southern Gothic. The guitar vamps in a bluesy droning loop as well, trapped in a whirlpool.

Dacus describes a moment in the present,

This Doppelganger of an uncertain figure, a girl from the narrator’s youth who strikes fear into her heart, is she the beautiful corpse in a casket on the way to the cemetery, or a star come to slum it about the old haunt? The narrator goes on to describe the young girl’s burgeoning sensuality, and how she became both vamp and victim of others’ leers. This might be why Dacus doesn’t really perform the song anymore, too easy to read this description of childhood sexuality as reductive, rude, jealous, or righteously smug. It can’t be the girl’s fault she was inappropriately sought after.

There’s a rest for the refrain, “I want to live in a world where I can keep my doors wide open, but who knows what’d get in and what’d get out. One of these nights I’ll sleep with the window down, but not until that creature is in the pound.”

The fear of haunting is the fear of the past returning to the present. Nostalgia is only an imagined comfort. To see the dead walk again is a harbinger of your own mortality’s immanent end.

In the song’s final third, it unfolds, the drums give way to a quickening heartbeat, then a rattling march.

The bridge is a ranging, searching, self-sabotaging reflection,

Dacus delivers the final lines like she has Wile E. Coyote’d her way of the cliff and cannot bear to look down.

We do not intend to be lessons in others lives, I think. Maybe Dacus feels some guilt for watching this other girl grow up, be used, abused, then remembering her only unkindly. I don’t think the song is an accusation of the Doppelganger, but an admission of fear. The invocation of family in this final verse is interesting. Her folks, her brother, her sister, are not to blame for the ills of the world, even if their actions (here left to the imagination) led the narrator to new and painful understandings. Even the “destruction” Dacus associates with the Doppelganger is an enigma. Destruction for whom? The ambiguity invites our own interpretation, and we, subconsciously or not, slot in characters from our own dramas into these roles, wondering what we would do or say if we saw someone who ushered us into a world we were not ready to see.

If you’re still reading this column, thank you. It’s fun for me. I hope it’s fun for you. It would mean a lot to me if you shared it with your friends.

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